Create Transformative Volunteer Experiences

2020 ◽  
Vol 25 (10) ◽  
pp. 3-3
Keyword(s):  
Volunteer Experiences

scholarly journals Senior Companion Program Volunteers: Exploring Experiences, Transformative Rituals, and Recruitment/Retention Issues

2015 ◽  
Author(s):  
Jason Ulsperger ◽  
Jericho McElroy ◽  
Haley Robertson ◽  
Kristen Ulsperger
Keyword(s):  
Social Interaction ◽  
Knowledge Base ◽  
Local Area ◽  
Future Research ◽  
Grocery Shopping ◽  
Minimal Level ◽  
Structural Ritualization Theory ◽  
Volunteer Recruitment ◽  
Volunteer Experiences ◽  
Depth Interviews

Senior Companion Programs (SCPs) help the homebound elderly. They operate through local Area Agencies on Aging, but any nonprofit institution can apply for funding and operate a SCP. Program volunteers are 55 and older. They visit qualified elderly clients, which includes people who do not have the ability to fully care for themselves. Volunteers provide social interaction to clients, but they also provide a minimal level of services, such as grocery shopping, light housekeeping, and respite for caregivers. Examining the experiences of volunteers in these programs can help us better understand why actively engaging with others is important as we age. It can also help us establish a knowledge base that aids in our understanding of how to recruit and retain senior volunteers. This article uses data gathered from phenomenologically based, qualitative in-depth interviews of 10 SCP volunteers. Focusing on volunteer experiences, it uses structural ritualization theory to analyze various volunteer activities, which the research considers ritualized symbolic practices. It also considers how transformative rituals within a SCP impact volunteerism, and it provides recommendations on how to increase SCP volunteer recruitment and retain volunteers. The article concludes with suggestions for future research.

Technologies of control: Asylum seeker and volunteer experiences in Australian immigration detention facilities

2018 ◽  
Vol 55 (2) ◽  
pp. 181-198 ◽  
Author(s):  
Michelle Peterie
Keyword(s):  
Emotional Distress ◽  
Asylum Seeker ◽  
Asylum Seekers ◽  
Daily Life ◽  
Immigration Detention ◽  
Volunteer Experiences ◽  
Negative Impacts ◽  
Detention Facilities

This article documents the experiences of volunteer visitors to Australia’s onshore immigration detention facilities, and considers what they reveal about the operation of power within this detention network. While immigration detention systems (including Australia’s) have received considerable academic attention in recent years, few scholars have examined the experiences of volunteers. Further, while the existing scholarship points to the negative impacts of immigration detention on detainees, the question of how these outcomes are produced at the level of daily institutional life has gone largely unanswered. The testimonies presented here provide a valuable window onto daily life in Australia’s onshore immigration detention centres, highlighting the opaque and capricious mechanisms through which they produce emotional distress in both asylum seekers and their supporters. In documenting these mechanisms and their effects, this article shows how ‘deterrence’ is enacted through the small and seemingly innocuous details of institutional life.

Lice work: Non-human trajectories in volunteer tourism

2019 ◽  
Vol 19 (2) ◽  
pp. 238-257 ◽  
Author(s):  
Amira Benali ◽  
Carina Ren
Keyword(s):  
Everyday Life ◽  
Network Theory ◽  
Actor Network Theory ◽  
Head Lice ◽  
Volunteer Tourism ◽  
Actor Network ◽  
Volunteer Experiences ◽  
Human Actors

This article studies volunteer tourism by following the trajectories of a non-human actor. Based on fieldwork at a Nepalese orphanage and drawing on insights from the material semiotics of Actor–Network Theory, we describe how the louse interferes as an unexpected actor with volunteer tourism at the orphanage. This post-human approach decentres the volunteer and destabilises the host–guest binary while adding to our understanding of tourism practices as complex and materially distributed endeavours. We analyse two configurations of head lice enacted through a modern morality of hygiene and Nepalese everyday life and show how they are deployed, contested and reconfigured onsite by volunteer tourism actors. By exploring patterns of absence and presence and using the concept of ontological choreography as an analytical resource, we show how the situated lice work of human and non-human actors at the orphanage offers new ways to grasp the forging of volunteer experiences and subjectivities.

Volunteer experiences in the build-up to the Rugby World Cup 2011

2014 ◽  
pp. 111-125 ◽  
Author(s):  
Karen A. Smith ◽  
Natalie Wolf ◽  
Leonie Lockstone-Binney
Keyword(s):  
World Cup ◽  
Volunteer Experiences

Disaster is in the Eye of the Beholder

2016 ◽  
pp. 516-533 ◽  
Author(s):  
JJ Pionke
Keyword(s):  
Historical Context ◽  
Point Of View ◽  
Cultural Institutions ◽  
The World ◽  
Volunteer Experiences ◽  
The Many

This chapter explores preservation and disaster issues in Singapore and Uganda from the point of view of the author's volunteer experiences in the summer of 2012. This is a snapshot of how two very different institutions, on different sides of the world, preserve materials and prepare for disaster, the many obstacles they encounter, and how they work with and through those obstacles. Preservation and disaster concepts are briefly discussed with the main focus on the historical context of the cultural institutions of education and the access to and preservation of their materials.

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