No, they aren’t under-represented in volunteering!

This article comes with a health warning — you might find it controversial and challenging. This may make you feel a little uncomfortable. As Arnold Bennett once said, though:

“Any change, even a change for the better, is always accompanied by discomforts.”

And I use that quote because I hope the result of this short article will be a change for the better in volunteer engagement.

Ready? Here we go.

We all know that certain groups of people are under-represented in volunteering, right?

Wrong!

They aren’t under-represented. They are historically and systemically excluded from volunteering.

Say it with me:

“They are historically and systemically excluded from volunteering”!

Saying people under-represented in volunteering implies it is their fault. They don’t engage. They don’t volunteer. This isn’t actually true. They do engage and volunteer, just not with our organisations. Why is that? Because we exclude them, whether we realise it or not.

We apply best practices in our volunteer engagement work without really considering if they are actually ‘best’ for everyone. If that doesn’t make sense to you then please read this article from 2020 by a colleague in Minnesota.

We define volunteering (and therefore who volunteers are) using terms and frameworks that are rooted in a white, western construct of volunteering. If someone is from a group community who doesn’t relate to those definitions — they may not even have the word ‘volunteer’ in their language! — then why would they come forward to help your organisation? The volunteering you offer isn’t something they understand.

Quite rightly, we are often called to open up our organisations to these so-called under-represented groups. We are challenged to broaden the diversity of our volunteer teams and to tackle any practical barriers to the engagement of a wide pool of volunteers. Barriers like expenses, so people aren’t financially disadvantaged through giving their time, or adaptations to premises or ways of working that can remove physical barriers to some people getting involved.

And so we should. There is plenty of evidence that diverse teams, whether of staff or volunteers, can be more creative, more innovative and more impactful than homogenous groups. Check out Matthew Syed’s wonderful book, ‘Rebel Ideas’ if you would like to explore this more fully.

Diversity is good. We should strive for it in our volunteer teams.

But we also need to be inclusive, to be accessible and to be equitable in our work. Simply targeting a recruitment campaign at an under-represented population in our community isn’t enough.

For six years, I worked for a disability organisation. Disabled people can be under-represented in formal, ‘mainstream’ volunteering. As I’ve already suggested, the associated assumption made all too often is that disabled people therefore do not volunteer. This is wrong. They do. A lot.

Disabled people are typically highly active in advocacy, self-help support networks, campaigns for disability rights and lots more. Yet, that regularly flies under the radar of many people because it doesn’t sit comfortably with the accepted conceptualisations of volunteering. Volunteers make cups of tea, they don’t agitate for change — those are campaigners, not volunteers. Right? Wrong!

So, when we say those people are under-represented in volunteering, what we are actually saying is that they don’t do the things we count as valid forms of volunteering. If they stopped what they already do and do it on our terms instead, then we’ll count them as volunteers.

This is an important paradigm shift. We shouldn’t be trying to change the people we want to engage as volunteers. We should be embracing a wider concept of volunteering and, in doing so, reducing the barriers we have erected that exclude others from engaging with us.

Here’s another example.

The UK’s Westminster government of the early 2000s had a goal of one million more people volunteering. That goal could have been met when roughly that number of people marched through London in 2003 to protest (as volunteers) against the then imminent invasion of Iraq. But that wasn’t the kind of volunteering that the government wanted to see, so it didn’t get counted.

Were all those people under-represented in volunteering? No! They were just doing things the people who counted volunteering didn’t like.

When we label groups and communities as under-represented in volunteering, we actually perpetuate a kind of discrimination that is far more subtle, far more common and far more insidious than not providing things like ramps into buildings, or only making opportunities available at times that suit certain types of people.

In conclusion, let’s absolutely see what we can do to remove the very real barriers to diverse involvement of volunteers in our organisations. But let’s also take a moment to reflect and see if there are less obvious barriers created by our personal, organisation and sectoral beliefs about volunteering.

They are perhaps the barriers we need to challenge first.