Visiting different websites, some of them categorized as or claiming to offer volunteer opportunities, it strikes me that it’s not always totally clear what counts as volunteering.

The obvious answer would be something like “it’s work that’s done for the benefit of others without pay” – and this may in fact be the best description of volunteering that I can arrive at in this context. But I think there are a number of activities that do fit this “definition” which most of us wouldn’t consider volunteering, and some activities we might consider volunteering which technically don’t fit this description.

The guide to ethical volunteering points out – and I think correctly – that the volunteer often stands to “gain” just as much as the people or community or cause supposedly being helped. This gain may not be financial, but is that really such a significant difference? In the case of, say, an unpaid internship – in many cases the intern may do the same work a volunteer would do, or may be in even more of a position to contribute to the cause, but the person is gaining valuable career experience and contacts. I don’t think this diminishes the value of the work – but is it still volunteering?

Similarly there are people who “volunteer” or do work for free in order to receive some similar benefit, or room and board, but without clearly contributing to some cause. Is this volunteering simply because they are doing work and not being paid in money? I would say not. That doesn’t mean it’s “wrong” – just that I wouldn’t consider it volunteering.

There are also cases where it isn’t always clear if the volunteer has even made a contribution – and not because there is a questions of whether they did work, but because “results” are often hard to measure – and the more significant ones perhaps even more so. Is it only important that the intentions were good? Or at the other extreme - does there have to be some measurable result?

Finally, you have people in, say, social service position jobs, where they do receive money/pay, but they still make a phenomenal contribution to a community. Is a person who pays $2000 to visit Ghana and work for a newspaper more deserving of the title of “volunteer” than, say, a public school teacher in an inner city school in Chicago who gets paid?

Perhaps this last point is more about values than about the question of what counts as volunteer work. In any case, I don’t really expect to arrive at an answer to these questions – but these are things I think about when I consider volunteering and which topics and issues to include in the Volunteer Logue. Some organizations do what we would consider “charity work” or in the non-profit sector but don’t have typicial volunteer “positions.”

What do you think?