Making Volunteers
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A01=Nina Eliasoph
Activism
Adult
African Americans
Ambivalence
Americans
AmeriCorps
Attendance
Author_Nina Eliasoph
Bedtime
Bureaucrat
Category=JBFC
Category=JBFD
Category=JHB
Category=JKS
Civic engagement
Classroom
Community development
Community service
Cultural diversity
Customer
Employment
Empowerment
eq_bestseller
eq_isMigrated=1
eq_isMigrated=2
eq_nobargain
eq_non-fiction
eq_society-politics
Everyday life
Experiment
Explanation
Family resemblance
Feeling
Food drive
Funding
Fundraising
Grandparent
Grassroots
Homeless shelter
Homelessness
Institution
Jane Addams
Literacy
Make A Difference
Michael Schudson
Multiculturalism
My Child
Nonprofit organization
Organization
Participant
Participation (decision making)
Politics
Poverty
Prediction
Project
Public housing
Publicity
Racism
Requirement
Scholarship
School district
Self-sufficiency
Social inequality
Social movement
Subsidy
Suggestion
Symptom
The Other Hand
Time horizon
Unintended consequences
Voluntary association
Volunteering
What Happened
Year
Youth
Youth empowerment
Youth engagement
Youth leadership
Youth program
Youth service
Youth worker
Product details
- ISBN 9780691147093
- Weight: 567g
- Dimensions: 152 x 235mm
- Publication Date: 20 Mar 2011
- Publisher: Princeton University Press
- Publication City/Country: US
- Product Form: Hardback
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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 resumes, 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.
Nina Eliasoph is associate professor of sociology at the University of Southern California. She is the author of "Avoiding Politics".
