What do we know about volunteering involving people with a forced migration background?

Much of the research and practice guidance that is freely available about volunteering is heavily influenced by the insights of those currently engaged in ‘formal’ volunteer management or ‘successful’ and ‘formal’ volunteering. In other words, the people for whom volunteering works well are those whose voices we hear and whose voices influence research, policy and decision making. While these voices should certainly be heard to build better, healthier volunteering, we need to work to hear the experience and knowledge of those unable to access or thrive in existing formal volunteering structures, and to understand the possibilities of new ways of thinking about and working with volunteers. This requires intentional collective action.

For example, the amount of people with a forced migration background able to access generic volunteering opportunities are a tiny minority, and it is easy for their experience, contribution and needs to be overlooked or diminished unless researchers and volunteer managers deliberately seek to ensure their contribution is supported, understood and reported on.

There are some structural issues in the way we create and access knowledge that we need to address collectively and strategically to be confident the time and resources of volunteers are given well. These include:

• A lack of trained, resourced and connected staff in volunteering, and especially in the migrant sector.

• Research and evaluation activity missing nuanced experiences
• Priority being given to evaluation activity and data needed for individual funding purposes, rather than to contributing to progressive collective goals
• Influence of structural, interpersonal, individual and internalised discrimination
• Paywalls
• Bias towards written knowledge, and knowledge shared in English (often from a white, western, female perspective)
• Data sharing concerns
• Cultures of individualism, competitiveness and perfectionism making it hard for people to openly share experience
• Undervaluing volunteering generally and ‘informal volunteering’ especially, means an erasure of the volunteering contributions by and for marginalised communities and a loss of the knowledge held in these spaces
• Absence of meaningful and ‘safer’ exit interviews
• A lack of meaningful participation - by a diverse range of ‘could be’ volunteers, volunteers and those receiving volunteering services, in developing programmes, activities, conversations and systems of accountability
• A lack of volunteering programmes built to bring together people with different experiences to learn from
• Funders, and non-profit leadership, staff and volunteering lack diversity; this deficit of thought is replicated in research and resources
• Short-termism, for example in organisational thinking, politics, funding streams
• Complicated and sometimes problematic ideas about volunteers and those impacted by volunteers
• Schroedinger’s volunteers; we see volunteers as essential but find it hard to prioritise, resourcing or developing volunteer programmes
• A lack of joint goals, ambitions and cross organisational working and learning
• A lack of bespoke research taking a critical view of the experience of volunteering or ‘receiving volunteering’ that takes intersectional experiences into account.