Volunteering, Identities and Wellbeing in Contexts of Health Inequalities

The causes of health inequalities are complex, involving material, psychosocial dimensions and power relations. Denigrating neoliberal discourses of individual responsibility shape and underpin policies which exacerbate poverty and compound its psychosocial impacts on people’s lives. Community asset-based approaches, which mobilise voluntary action, have been proposed as a means of addressing health inequalities, and a substantial body of research suggests that participating in volunteering can bring benefits to psychological wellbeing. This study explores the experiences of volunteers with lived experience of poverty and other intersecting disadvantages, using an ethnographic psychosocial approach, adapted from the free association narrative interview method. It draws on participant observation and interviews with 11 volunteers and four managers within two settings within disadvantaged communities in a city in the north of England. The analysis of this data considers these experiences of volunteering in relation to theorised social and psychological drivers of health inequalities, as well as concepts commonly used in the literature on volunteering and health. Using a psychosocial lens reveals the significance of identity validation as a pathway through which volunteers within disadvantaged communities may resist denigrating narratives and make claims to ‘respectability’, which facilitate experiences of acceptance and belonging. While volunteering may ameliorate the impacts of inequalities on individual and community health and wellbeing, the individual, organisational and wider social contexts within which volunteering takes place are integral to these effects.