Community volunteering: Motives and conditions for social engagement

Abstract

Volunteering as unpaid assistance to an individual or a group of people has great importance for the development of civil society and social welfare. The purpose of this study is to investigate the motives and conditions for social engagement in community volunteering using one of the regions in Russia as an example. In Spring 2019, 25 narrative interviews with volunteers were conducted. The study discovered the complementarity of moral and rational aspects of volunteering activities, as well as the complementarity of formal and informal volunteering practices that strengthen the capacity of the social welfare sector in the local community. Understanding the wide spectrum of volunteers’ motives, not just altruistic but also pragmatic, has practical importance for the development of community volunteering not only in the local but also in the global context.