“We’d get slagged and bullied”: understanding barriers to volunteering among young people in deprived urban areas

Abstract

This article explores barriers to formal volunteering opportunities among young people, aged 12–18, in deprived urban areas in Glasgow, Scotland. It draws on qualitative fieldwork conducted with young volunteers, non-volunteers and youth workers. The article employs Bourdieu's concept of 'habitus' to analyse how objective conditions and subjective dispositions created obstacles to participation. Findings indicate that participants were constrained from accessing volunteering due to: resource issues in youth organisations; a lack of support from schools; a lack of information; and restrictions on their spatial mobilities. These constraints provided conditions in which volunteering became subject to informal penalties. These were not, however, experienced in a uniform manner but intersected with gender and individual trajectories to create varying opportunities for volunteering.

Informal Volunteering, Inequality, and Illegitimacy

“…Informal and formal volunteering are not the same, but they should be treated equally. By building on the small but growing number of empirical volunteering studies informed by Bourdieu’s theories of symbolic and cultural capital (Davies, 2018; Dean, 2016; Harflett, 2015; Snee, 2013), this gap can be bridged. This work should happen in multiple contexts within and across communities and countries—a limitation of this article is that it has focused almost entirely on the U.K. and U.S. contexts due to space constraints, and the position of informal volunteering in relation to wider social relations will exist differently elsewhere, such as less unequal, more social democratic states.…”

“…Partly this is because informal volunteering may be an activity that is easier to access than formal volunteering, lacking the bureaucracy associated with assisting an organization. As Davies's (2018) work on barriers to volunteering among young people from deprived areas shows, objective barriers (such as lack of resources, lack of information, school constraints, and spatial inequalities) and subjective barriers (such as perceptions of formal volunteering as "uncool" and emasculating) impede participation in formal volunteering but not informal volunteering. The voluntary sector in the United Kingdom and elsewhere plays a formalized part in society, where its work is generally conceptualized as service and work rather than mutual aid and activism (Rochester et al, 2010), with the operating structures of most nonprofit organizations similar to those in the public and private sectors.…”

“…Partly this is because informal volunteering may be an activity that is easier to access than formal volunteering, lacking the bureaucracy associated with assisting an organization. As Davies’s (2018) work on barriers to volunteering among young people from deprived areas shows, objective barriers (such as lack of resources, lack of information, school constraints, and spatial inequalities) and subjective barriers (such as perceptions of formal volunteering as “uncool” and emasculating) impede participation in formal volunteering but not informal volunteering.…”

A grammar for non-teleological geographies: Differentiating the divergence of intention and outcomes in the everyday

“…It responds to the intuition of teleological explanation, that human behaviour is inherently purposive. Studies of youth volunteering are orientated towards either identifying the motivations of young people to volunteer (Davies, 2018; Handy et al, 2010; Hustinx and Lammertyn, 2003) or the outcomes of their volunteering. Outcomes are identified with broader societal benefits (such as the creation of a ‘big’ society, Mohan, 2012) or the subjects that are created through this activity in relation to citizenship (Baillie Smith and Laurie, 2011; Milligan and Fyfe, 2005; Yarwood, 2005), employability (Kamerãde and Paine, 2014; Leonard and Wilde, 2019) and well-being (Mcgarvey et al, 2019).…”

You Shall (Not) Pass: Strategies for Third-Party Gatekeepers to Enhance Volunteer Inclusion

“…As elaborated upon earlier, volunteering excludes certain individuals when volunteer recruitment only targets those individuals with volunteering potential (i.e., having certain antecedents and backgrounds) (Davies, 2018;Musick & Wilson, 2008). Volunteer gatekeepers consider certain groups as inappropriate and inefficient audiences when they recruit for volunteers.…”