By Sha Cordingley, CEO Volunteering Australia: 28 March 2006

Part 2 (see part 1 in this forum).

It was said that one of the benefits to Sydney of staging the Olympic Games was that it would gain a unique, trained volunteer workforce. It was also hoped that the event might encourage more people to volunteer for other events or programs. I’m guessing that given the numbers of people already volunteering, a good proportion of the Sydney Olympics and Commonwealth Games volunteers have both a history of giving and volunteering. We know for a fact that the people providing emergency service and sporting support for the Commonwealth Games were already existing volunteers in those areas; and some business sponsors released paid staff to volunteer as part of their overall program of volunteer involvement.

People come to volunteering with many motives and I for one wouldn’t like to judge the merit of their activities against some arbitrary value scale. Plus, apart from anything else we know that many people volunteer for more than one organisation. For example in 2000, over a third of volunteers (35%) had worked for more than one organisation in the preceding 12 months.

The simple proposition that Commonwealth Games volunteers should instead have ‘worked extra hours in their day jobs (assuming they have one) and donated this extra money to feed some of the starving in Africa’ may provide comfort and solution to some – but to me that smacks of the logic my mother used about not leaving food on our plates because there are starving people in the world. Perhaps a more systemic approach to some of the world’s structural problems might be a better solution than bagging a handful for people having fun.

end

The article certainly was mean-spirited and utterly judgemental. I wonder where Mirko volunteers? With Medicines Sans Frontieres?

I volunteer once a week, working with a group of children. I get significant personal joy out of this (very cute kids: and I can give them back later!)- does that make my volunteering for the "wrong" reasons? The more I think about this article, and its bad attitude to all the good things that volunteering does for individuals and the community, whatever the original motivation, the more annoyed I get.