Most volunteering is a waste of time for anyone except the volunteer

http://jseliger.wordpress.com/2014/06/19/most-volunteering-is-a-waste-of-time-for-anyone-except-the-volunteer/

by jseliger • 12 years ago

21 13 12 years ago

jseliger.wordpress.com

sportanova• 12 years ago

I just felt a great disturbance in the Force, as if millions of high school juniors suddenly cried out in terror, and were suddenly silenced.

anouk_anca2• 12 years ago

Well, yes, volunteering in Africa does not make sense from a cost-benefit perspective, unless you actually posses a skill that is in short supply over there (i.e. doctors). However, volunteering at your local homeless shelter, orphanage, retirement home or women's shelter, where your work does not incur any extra costs for the institution you are helping, is a completely different thing.

vacri5• 12 years ago

It depends how short-sighted your goals are. If your goal is solely "build a house in rural Angola", then yes, hire local talent. If your goals include "making our youth more worldly, exposing them to other cultures" or "extend soft power by building bridges between citizens", then it's very worthwhile.

The author of the article strikes me as a 'worth of everything and value of nothing' type person, only seeing the literal end goal.

anouk_anca2• 12 years ago

Those goals are not strictly related to volunteering though, they can be accomplished with exchange programs or tourism (if done through local tour guides). The main issue with voluntourism is that it does not promote sustainable growth in the communities it is trying to help, and therefore is not a good long term solution for the problems it is trying to solve. Not to mention taking jobs away from local workers who could really need the money.

quadrangle2• 12 years ago

This isn't a problem with volunteering, it's a problem with most volunteering.

It's the same fact as "most jobs are bullshit" As in http://www.strikemag.org/bullshit-jobs/

There's tons of waste an inefficiency in our world today, and most people fool themselves into thinking what they are doing matters. But if we just question things, we can find ways to actually help whether in our careers or as volunteers.

vacri5• 12 years ago

My guess is also that the organisations the author mentioned actually mean "we don't want more volunteers" rather than "we don't want volunteers at all". It's an important semantic difference, since the value of a volunteer in the former statement is not nil.

quadrangle2• 12 years ago

Right, I wasn't disagreeing with the article, just giving it a different frame.

ghshephard• 12 years ago

The article mentions this, but it certainly bears repeating - the best kind of volunteers are the ones who have developed their 10,000 hours of expertise in their profession, and then volunteer their time.

Back in 1998, a small group of us volunteers took the Red Cross in Palo Alto and wired it up for Ethernet Networking in a single weekend. I'd had about 6 years of pretty intensive IT training, so was able to manage the Network Stacks on the Network/Desktops (They were using Novell networking in the Red Cross, and trust me when I say it was not a foregone conclusion that your workstation would be able to talk to your NIC, let alone your Network back in 1998. IRQs, himem.sys and such).

The guy leading the cable plant, and punchdowns had been doing so for close to 8 years, and had every type of cable plant certification you can think of. He also got his Cabling company to donate a truckload of brand-new Cat 5E cabling, tools, etc..

Ironically, the least skilled volunteer on our team, (for this kind of work), was a guy by the name of Ed McCreight (though he was still pretty damn handy, and certainly held his own when running cable) - who I only learned later was a fairly Sr. Scientist at Adobe working on their PDF engine, and, oh yeah, had co-invented the B-Tree.

vacri5• 12 years ago

Be an example to others by becoming an expert, instead of by sacrificing time that should be optimally spent doing something useful for a large number of people.

10,000 hours in days to become an expert = 416 full 24-hour days. 1 week in days in developing nation helping out = 7 full 24-hour days.

Helping out somewhere doesn't make a dint in that 10k hours; it's not like it's an either/or.

j4pe• 12 years ago

I wonder what the author thinks can be done to improve volunteerism?

Here in the Philippines I met a troop of British deaf-assistance volunteers, visiting for three months, who don't know sign language and happily admit their own uselessness. Clearly this is suboptimal. But the only solution he presents in the piece - make money and give it to NGOs to hire professionals - sounds, well, not exactly surprising coming from a grant writing consultant. The authors of books like Dead Aid [1] and White Man's Burden [2] would have a few research-backed criticisms of what his suggested approach does to NGOs' effectiveness.

I was hoping to find some in-trade NGO hacks for travel volunteerism, or Doctors Without Borders for Everything, but without any new approach presented, this piece is just complaining about a pretty obvious problem.

-------------------

[1] Dead Aid https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/6184317-dead-aid [2] White Man's Burden https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/33513.The_White_Man_s_Bu...

gaelenh• 12 years ago

I've volunteered almost every week for the last 6 years running free STEM programs in local schools in Brooklyn. The robotics program I started runs entirely off of volunteers, most of whom I've never met before their first day and certainly aren't robotic specialists. About 40 4th graders from 3 schools get ~40 hours of free robotics classes every year. Not bad for a bunch of unpaid volunteers. To be clear, the robotics program wouldn't exist without us, and everyone--the kids, parents, school--are all very happy we do it.

New York Cares is a non-profit that organizes volunteers for all sorts of community organizations. Knitting at senior centers, arts and crafts at transitional housing centers, cooking programs at rec centers. Again, the programs wouldn't exist without the volunteers, and the intended recipients definitely enjoy them and benefit.

The robotics program was recently written about in a Brooklyn local paper: http://www.homereporternews.com/news/school_news/sunset-spar...

Most volunteering is a waste of time for anyone except the volunteer

Related Stories