Organizing volunteering in the community: Comparing The Netherlands and the United States

Just as in other countries, the government is retreating in The Netherlands. But this time the retreat is on a more fundamental scale of handing over tasks to communities and community organizations aiming to make citizens... [ view full abstract ]

Just as in other countries, the government is retreating in The Netherlands. But this time the retreat is on a more fundamental scale of handing over tasks to communities and community organizations aiming to make citizens become more self-reliant. The claim on community organizations behind this fundamental retreat contrasts markedly with the situation in the United States, where aside from very marginal investments in citizen involvement through programs such as AmeriCorps and Vista, government historically has not been greatly involved in arranging many tasks for citizens and community organizations.
One major aspect of community organizations is their use of volunteers and volunteering. Although The Netherlands and the US boast high levels of volunteering, major differences in volunteering and volunteer management separate them with respect to community organizations and their relation to government.
A first difference can be found in the emotional and perceptional basis of volunteering. Dekker (2002) maintains that in The Netherlands volunteering is seen as active membership, while in the US it is viewed much more as unpaid labor (Brudney, 2016, 1990). A second difference concerns the activities that volunteers perform or are seen as performing that constitute volunteering. As Meijs et al. (2003) show popular conceptions of “who is a volunteer” are comparable across countries yet do differ considerably with regard to certain examples, such as corporate volunteering. A third difference can be found in the kind of organizations that are dominant in volunteering in these countries: sport associations in the Netherlands versus social service organizations, including religious congregations, in the United States. As a result, volunteering is much more about membership in The Netherlands versus service in the US. Accordingly, volunteer management in the European sphere can be described as membership-based, beginning with asking the existing membership to act as volunteers to perform new tasks, while in the US volunteer management is largely program-based, staring with recruitment of volunteers (rather than members) to perform needed tasks (Meijs and Hoogstad, 2001). A notable exception in the US is volunteering through religious institutions, which resembles the European membership model.
In the proposed research we develop these different cross-national perspectives on volunteering and volunteer management further. We link them to the “four discourses” on volunteering in relation to government as developed by Hilger (2006) and link them to the discussion of volunteering infrastructure provide by van den Bos (2014). In the end we argue and show that the countries such as the United States which have a programmatic basis for most volunteering will prove more adaptable to organizing volunteering in the community because the withdrawal of government does not affect the services the voluntary sector is asked to performed and the recruitment methods for citizen involvement. By contrast, the government withdrawal will have a larger effect in the European context because it will place new demands on the volunteer capacity of citizens to assume service tasks that they have not been asked to perform through their membership in organizations and, indeed, affect the very nature and conception of membership.