Opinion: Motivations, demographics and cultural relevance
This opinion article is one in a series of responses by thought leaders in response to our State of the Decade of Volunteering report.
Amanda Reid is the Chief Executive Officer/ Tumu Whakarae of BERL. She has expertise in the Māori economy, indigenous trade, workforce development, diversity, and evaluation and impact measurement.
There have been clear shifts in volunteering participation for many organisations since the 1970s.
From my research, what we’re seeing is that motivations for both unpaid volunteering and paid work are shifting generationally.
Younger people tend to be more strongly motivated by values, so they're looking for values alignment between their personal values and the organisation or cause. For older people, motivation tends be around community and belonging, and about contribution to where they are at.
I think it's not that motivation is disappearing. I think it's just diversifying. What that means is that we need to change how we organise and recruit volunteers. Our systems and maps for engagement were designed for a different era and no longer fit modern lives. Some of the research I've looked at shows that younger age groups are more likely to volunteer for one-off kind of events than to do an afternoon on an ongoing basis.
Need for flexibility for recruitment
Which makes it challenging when you have complicated induction processes for training and on boarding. There may be really good reasons, like some places need a lot of health and safety and support wrapped around, and there are genuine duty-of-care requirements. Those requirements still matter, but they can also create friction if not designed flexibly.
One-size fits-all recruitment doesn't work. It doesn’t work in employment, and it doesn’t work in volunteering. We need segmented, culturally relevant pathways that fit different age groups, different people's availability. All this takes resource, and no one’s paying organisations for this to take an approach in a different way. When motivation matches opportunity, then people don’t need persuading - they need enabling. Motivation is not the issue; fit is [the issue].