Making volunteers : civic life after welfare's end / Nina Eliasoph.

Format:

Book

Author/Creator:

Eliasoph, Nina.

Series:

Princeton studies in cultural sociology.

Princeton studies in cultural sociology

Language:

English

Subjects (All):

Voluntarism--United States--Case studies.

Voluntarism.

Young volunteers in community development--United States--Case studies.

Young volunteers in community development.

Volunteer workers in community development--United States--Case studies.

Volunteer workers in community development.

Community development--United States--Case studies.

Community development.

Physical Description:

1 online resource (329 p.)

Edition:

Core Textbook

Place of Publication:

Princeton : Princeton University Press, c2011.

Language Note:

English

Summary:

Volunteering improves inner character, builds community, cures poverty, and prevents crime. We've all heard this kind of empowerment talk from nonprofit and government-sponsored civic programs. But what do these programs really accomplish? In Making Volunteers, Nina Eliasoph offers an in-depth, humorous, wrenching, and at times uplifting look inside youth and adult civic programs. She reveals an urgent need for policy reforms in order to improve these organizations and shows that while volunteers learn important lessons, they are not always the lessons that empowerment programs aim to teach. With short-term funding and a dizzy mix of mandates from multiple sponsors, community programs develop a complex web of intimacy, governance, and civic life. Eliasoph describes the at-risk youth served by such programs, the college-bound volunteers who hope to feel selfless inspiration and plump up their resumés, and what happens when the two groups are expected to bond instantly through short-term projects. She looks at adult "plug-in" volunteers who, working in after-school programs and limited by time, hope to become like beloved aunties to youth. Eliasoph indicates that adult volunteers can provide grassroots support but they can also undermine the family-like warmth created by paid organizers. Exploring contradictions between the democratic rhetoric of empowerment programs and the bureaucratic hurdles that volunteers learn to navigate, the book demonstrates that empowerment projects work best with less precarious funding, more careful planning, and mandatory training, reflection, and long-term commitments from volunteers. Based on participant research inside civic and community organizations, Making Volunteers illustrates what these programs can and cannot achieve, and how to make them more effective.

Contents:

Frontmatter

Contents

Acknowledgments

Introduction: Empower Yourself!

CHAPTER 1. How to Learn Something in an Empowerment Project

PART ONE. Cultivating Open Civic Equality

CHAPTER 2. Participating under Unequal Auspices

CHAPTER 3. "The Spirit that Moves Inside You": Puzzles of Using Volunteering to Cure the Volunteer's Problems

CHAPTER 4. Temporal Leapfrog: Puzzles of Timing

CHAPTER 5. Democracy Minus Disagreement, Civic Skills Minus Politics, Blank "Reflections"

PART TWO. Cultivating Intimate Comfort and Safety

CHAPTER 6. Harmless and Destructive Plug-in Volunteers

CHAPTER 7. Paid Organizers Creating Temporally Finite, Intimate, Family-like Attachments

CHAPTER 8. Publicly Questioning Need: Food, Safety, and Comfort

CHAPTER 9. Drawing on Shared Experience in a Divided Society: Getting People Out of Their "Clumps"

PART THREE. Celebrating Our Diverse, Multicultural Community

CHAPTER 10. "Getting Out of Your Box" versus "Preserving a Culture": Two Opposed Ways of "Appreciating Cultural Diversity"

CHAPTER 11. Tell Us about Your Culture: What Participants Count as "Culture"

CHAPTER 12. Celebrating ... Empowerment Projects!

CONCLUSION. Finding Patterns in the "Open and Undefined" Organization: Gray Flannel Man Is Mostly Dead

APPENDIX 1. On Justification

APPENDIX 2. Methods of Taking Field Notes and Making Them Tell a Story

Notes

References

Index

Backmatter

Notes:

Description based upon print version of record.

Includes bibliographical references and index.

ISBN:

9786613009159

9781283009157

1283009153

9781400838820

1400838827

OCLC:

714802993