What is a volunteer organization?

Nowadays, spontaneous volunteering is fashionable. Many very sincerely, often emotionally respond to someone else’s grief, to some kind of social problem. One way or another, like moths on a warm summer night, volunteer groups or initiatives suddenly appear and just as suddenly disappear. No matter how much such positive volunteer help is in demand, this is not enough for us. We think, or rather even believe, that volunteering can be serious, systematic and organized.

The question “What is a volunteer organization?” not legal. Volunteers are attracted to their activities by associations and structures that are very different in their legal form. In Russian legislation, there is no such thing as a “volunteer organization”.

We should talk about this. A volunteer organization is primarily a stable community of volunteers (or volunteers, which is the same thing) that exists to help someone or to solve some social problem. Volunteers are people who help with their personal participation. Their resource is their time, effort, skills, but not money.

A volunteer organization is characterized by the following:

People are united and united by some basic essential values. The meaning of their unity is not profit or other personal gain, but the provision of voluntary assistance. For example, we can talk about helping children with cancer. There is a child, he is sick, he needs not only medicines and medical help, but also blood, leisure, creativity, self-realization. Helping a child, giving him all this is the value for which the volunteers unite.

A volunteer organization should be, pardon the tautology, organized. As strange as it may sound to someone, it is necessarily assumed that there is a structure in the community of volunteers. Tasks and functionality should be distributed among people. There must be a hierarchy – it usually develops spontaneously, and is based on informal leadership. Of course, volunteers are those who voluntarily, on an equal footing, enter the community. Each of them by itself does not owe anything to anyone. But, even in the community of equals, there are people who are ready to make serious decisions and are ready to bear great responsibility.

A volunteer organization cannot exist without the existence of common and accepted approaches to decision-making by the participants. In the volunteer community, one way or another, everyone should participate in the life of the organization, albeit through the delegation of authority and responsibility to someone. You just need to understand that this is not a hobby club. This is a community for a common cause. Hence, everyone’s voice is important. However, for decision-making, the voice of those who are ready to implement this decision, who are ready to invest responsibly, is more weighty and serious.

A volunteer organization is built around informal leaders, bright personalities who are ready to lead the majority. Of course, in order to carry out charitable activities, leaders must have formal authority and resources. But this is secondary to charisma. By the way, this is why volunteer communities are very different. They are often structured around the leader in one way or another.

The main resource of a volunteer organization is people, their relationships, their internal and external connections. Therefore, a volunteer organization is a self-sustaining, largely self-sufficient system capable of adapting very flexibly to any circumstances. Money and other resources are very important, but they are not fundamental.