The COVID-19 pandemic presents Northern-based development organisations with unprecedented difficulties. They are challenged in fundraising opportunities in their home countries and in finding ways to continue their work in the Global South. As the first study to present a systematic mixed method, cross-country study of small-scale, voluntary development organisations in four different European countries, this study provides insight into the role of these private development initiatives (PDIs) in the COVID-19 crisis and sheds light on the differential impact of the crisis on these organisations. Whereas most PDIs are involved in long(er)-term development interventions, the COVID-19 crisis was for most organisations their first experience of emergency aid. Overall, we see strong resilience among PDIs and also find that the organisations which relied more exclusively on traditional methods of fundraising (offline) received a greater funding hit than organisations—often with more younger members—that had already moved to online fundraising.

Many volunteer organizations offer short-term international voluntary service (IVS) opportunities as an avenue for participants to provide aid and humanitarian relief in international communities. This study empirically examines four potential antecedents of IVS performance among short-term IVS participants in developing countries: IVS participants’ intention to serve in similar IVS roles in the future, whether their IVS is at their preferred geographic location, IVS participants’ prior experience in the host country, and their performance in the sending organization’s trainings prior to the IVS. Utilizing both analyses of variance and OLS regression analysis of 147 IVS participants across 18 developing countries, we find evidence that short-term IVS performance is positively associated with future intentions to participate in IVS, previously having visited the host country, and performance during pre-travel trainings. Further, we analyze 158 blog posts written by 19 sample IVS participants, which provides a unique ‘inside look’ into the relationship between host country language skills and IVS performance.

This paper explores volunteering and inequality in the global South through an analysis of volunteering remuneration. We argue that the growing remuneration of volunteers reflects an increasing financialisation of volunteering by aid and development donors to match labour to project and sectoral objectives. We examine how these remuneration strategies shape volunteering economies and (re)produce hierarchies and inequalities in contexts in the global South where volunteers are often from marginalised communities. We analyse data collected in Africa and the Middle East as part of the International Federation of Red Cross and Red Crescent Societies (IFRC) Global Review on Volunteering to explore these interweaving volunteering hierarchies and how they articulate with existing social stratifications. In these contexts, we argue that a livelihoods and capabilities approach across macro-, national and local levels provides an alternative and more nuanced way of accounting for volunteer remuneration within the range of assets that communities have to build their lives and future. When oriented towards catalysing these community assets, and away from rewarding particular kinds of individual labour, remuneration has the potential to enable rather than undermine sustained volunteering activity by and within marginalised communities.

The study of nonprofit finance and financial management is growing in popularity. The numerical focus and availability of archival U.S. data have fueled the growth of the field; however, this availability has also influenced the research questions and methods utilized by researchers. Despite the dominance of large-scale quantitative analysis in the literature, there are a wide variety of research methods available in the field. Each approach has strengths and limitations that should be utilized to answer different research questions in different ways. We catalog these techniques and include recommendations on how and why to deliberately cultivate methodological pluralism in nonprofit finance and financial management research.

This study compares the need of the communities, the availability of financial resources for the organizations, and the density of existing organizations on NGOs' and NFCs' founding behavior in Nepal between 2012 and 2018. The study uses negative binomial regression models to demonstrate that NGOs and NFCs emerge in relatively prosperous areas than serving the communities with need. Furthermore, the density of similar organizations also affected where NGOs and NFCs emerge. This research also demonstrates that night time light data can serve as a reliable alternative proxy for measuring the communities' well-being and wealth at the subnational level in developing countries.

Area-based initiatives (ABIs) is a frequently used strategy within contemporary urban regeneration policies to tackle physical and social challenges in deprived neighbourhoods. A central characteristic of their approach is active involvement of local stakeholders as part of making robust and lasting improvements. The claim raised in this article is that urban regeneration mobilizes citizens through a narrow perception of “voluntarism” that tends to exclude vulnerable and socially marginalized citizens. The article presents a typology of voluntarism that makes a distinction between (a) social voluntarism, (b) civic voluntarism and (c) hybrid voluntarism, combining non-paid voluntarism with pro-profit activities. Empirically, we draw on studies from ABIs in Denmark where collaboration with charity organizations and hybrid organizations has been used to mobilize marginalized citizens in the urban regeneration areas. We find that collaborations with charity-based and hybrid organizations are sparse and small-scale so far, but appear promising with regards to involve socially vulnerable groups.

During crises such as the present coronavirus disease-19 (COVID-19) pandemic, nonprofits play a key role in ensuring support to improve the most vulnerable individuals’ health, social, and economic conditions. One year into the COVID-19 pandemic, an extensive automated literature analysis was conducted of 154 academic articles on nonprofit management during the pandemic—all of which were published in 2020. This study sought to identify and systematize academics’ contributions to knowledge about the crisis’s impact on the nonprofit sector and to ascertain the most urgent directions for future research. The results provide policymakers, nonprofit practitioners, and scholars an overview of the themes addressed and highlight the important assistance academic researchers provide to nonprofits dealing with the COVID-19 pandemic.

While the international literature has significantly addressed the “new forms of voluntary action,” there has been limited attention paid so far to the reintermediation processes of contemporary volunteering. This paper intends to fill this gap. First, a research approach based on a renewed sociological consideration of volunteering, path dependency and strategic field theory is presented and four ideal–typical traditions of volunteering (active membership, direct, program-based and organize-it-yourselves) are introduced. Then the Italian case is explored. Although the analysis is only exploratory, it enables us to understand the coevolutions of the four traditions and to identify a new restructuration model based on professional agencies coming from the membership tradition. The paper can help future studies to reconsider the magnitude and dynamics of second modernity trends and to tackle continuities and changes in the reintermediation of volunteering in situated and processual terms.

In the context of super-diverse cities, scholars and policy makers are increasingly interested in the potential of volunteering to establish identification for newcomers and locals alike. In this paper, we address the question of how young volunteers in Rotterdam and Vienna negotiate belonging within their super-diverse surroundings. Our exploratory study builds on a cross-national research project in which we collected qualitative interview data from volunteering youth. We follow a weak-theory approach and conceptualise belonging as emotional, procedural, and relational. We trace identification processes of newcomers and locals in terms of belonging through volunteering in urban contexts of super-diversity. Our paper demonstrates that volunteering serves as a vehicle for feelings of belonging and inclusion for young volunteers, specifically addressing the urban super-diversity of Vienna and Rotterdam. Our research also indicates the partiality and temporality of volunteering as a source of belonging and the function of volunteering as a structure of inclusion, not necessarily enabling structural inclusion.

While rich literature examines the relationship between volunteers and volunteer organizations, cross-sectoral difference in volunteer involvement remains under-researched. Most previous studies addressed primarily nonprofit organizations but paid inadequate attention to the increasing diversity of volunteer involving organizations such as governments, corporations, and professional associations in the past years. Conducting 441 surveys with eldercare volunteers in Beijing, China, this study compares volunteer involvement between the four major categories of volunteer organizers, including public institutions, neighborhood organizations, nonprofit organizations, and enterprises. It finds that there were no significant cross-sectoral differences among the volunteers both in their perception of volunteering and in their intent to remain with their current organizers, controlling for their personal characteristics. However, the cross-sectoral differences in volunteers’ motivation, participation, and some satisfaction aspects were significant. This study reveals a great variation of sectoral difference in volunteer involvement and concludes with implications and suggestions for future research.

This paper explores how ethnographic approaches to third sector and nonprofit studies allow for context-based understandings of the links between volunteering and development. Drawing from our ethnographies of volunteering in Sierra Leone, Burundi and the Philippines, we argue that ethnographic methods could tease out local ideologies and practices of volunteer work that can challenge knowledge monopolies over how volunteering is understood and, later, transcribed into development policy and practice at various levels. The contribution of ethnography as a methodology to third sector research lies not only in the in-depth data it generates but also in the kind of ethos and disposition it requires of scholars—providing attention to issues of power and voice and leaning into the unpredictability of the research process.

This study investigates public reactions to cross-sectoral partnership communication from a nonprofit’s perspective. In two experiments, this study examined how key partnership portfolio configurations, size and diversification, influence individual publics’ trust, attitude, and supportive intentions to the focal nonprofit. In addition, it explored the moderating effect of nonprofit cynicism in this process. Findings of this study contradict the win–win assumption of cross-sectoral partnerships and add new insights to nonprofit organizations’ partner selection and disclosure.

Are rural residents more likely to volunteer than those living in urban places? Although early sociological theory posited that rural residents were more likely to experience social bonds connecting them to their community, increasing their odds of volunteer engagement, empirical support is limited. Drawing upon the full population of rural and urban respondents to the United States Census Bureau’s current population survey volunteering supplement (2002–2015), we found that rural respondents are more likely to report volunteering compared to urban respondents, although these differences are decreasing over time. Moreover, we found that propensities for rural and urban volunteerism vary based on differences in both individual and place-based characteristics; further, the size of these effects differs across rural and urban places. These findings have important implications for theory and empirical analysis.

This study addresses a major challenge the nonprofit sector is facing: low organizational commitment from employees. In response to the call to take into consideration contextual and institutional factors, it draws from the stakeholder theory and the organizational support theory to investigate how internal and external organizational processes could influence organizational commitment. The quantitative data collected from over 200 nonprofit employees revealed that organizational commitment was positively related to engaged leadership, community engagement effort, degree of formalization in daily operations, and perceived intangible support for employees. Further analysis showed that tangible support measured as perceived fair pay has an indirect effect, which is contingent upon how well the nonprofits engage with internal and external stakeholders. Findings suggest that nonprofit employees’ personal tangible gains may come second when assessing their commitment to the organization; instead, how well their employer manages stakeholder relationships in a larger community plays a more significant role.

There are ongoing management and societal challenges affecting volunteering participation. These place a premium on organizations identifying individuals that currently do not volunteer but have the willingness and capacity to do so, the “Potentials”. Supplementing the limited non-volunteer literature, we seek to quantify this potential volunteer pool using constructs aligned to the willingness, capability and availability dimensions from Meijs et al.’s (Volunt Action 8:36–54, 2006) volunteerability framework. Using binary logistic regression testing with a nationally representative sample of Australian volunteers and non-volunteers, we found partial support for the framework’s willingness and capability dimensions determining volunteer status. We then applied a predictive equation to the non-volunteer sample to calculate their percentage likelihood of volunteering, to identify a cohort of “Potential” volunteers. Further testing revealed statistically significant differences between this cohort compared to other non-volunteers based on various interventions for promoting volunteering. The implications of our novel study and an associated research agenda are discussed.

This study illuminates the size, scope, and impact of U.S. faith-based nonprofits in the international affairs sector. Through analysis of IRS microdata, we estimate the prevalence, total revenue, and direct charitable giving to Organizations with Religious Expression (OREs) within the International Affairs subsector (n = 262). Our study provides new language to categorize religiously identified organizations and seeks to demonstrate the distinctive identities and activities of OREs in contrast to organizations with no known religious expression. We find that OREs constitute more than half of the organizations in the sector and estimate that between a third and almost half of all donations to the international affairs subsector go to OREs. In contrast to organizations with no known religious expression, OREs also receive a much greater share of annual revenue from direct support.

Ethical issues of ethnographic research are long-debated, but the context of volunteering and voluntary organisations emphasises challenges and opportunities associated with this method. In this paper, we explore these rarely examined concerns with focus on participant-observation, in terms of ‘voluntariness’ of participants, responsibilities of researchers in maintaining boundaries and self-care of researchers themselves in such contexts. Reflecting on implications in ethnographic enquiry from research design to conclusions, we argue volunteering should be viewed as an important context highlighting ethical issues often seen as ‘tick-box’ exercises or generally accepted research limitations. The increased risks to participants through access, sampling and questioning processes, to ethnographers through emotional involvement and to volunteer-involving organisations are discussed through reflection on three distinct pieces of research conducted between 2009 and 2019. These issues are ethical as well as methodological, as data yielded may be rich, demonstrating immersion in the ‘community’, but also limited in credibility.

According to the basic psychological need theory, satisfaction and frustration of basic psychological needs are related to different psychological correlates. The present study aimed to test this tenet in volunteers for a national sport event using a person-centered approach. Specifically, the present study was undertaken to (a) identify the optimal number of need profiles and (b) to examine the associations between identified need profiles and potential correlates including work climate, intrinsic motivation, emotional exhaustion, and continuance intention. Data were collected from 924 volunteers (age range: 18–25 years) for a national sporting event. Results of latent profile analysis showed three need profiles, and the “High Satisfaction, Low Frustration” profile had higher levels of work climate and continuance intention, and a lower level of emotional exhaustion than the other two profiles. These findings enhance the understanding of the basic psychological needs and their relevance to psychological functioning in the context of sport volunteering.

The institutional complexity of social enterprises (SEs) often hinders their access to financing from conventional investors. To align the interests of SEs and their investors, innovative investment instruments of social finance are emerging. However, there is evidence of a mismatch between the financial needs of SEs and the instruments offered by social finance entities (SFEs). The analysis of 34 SEs and 6 SFEs through the lens of agency theory shows that some barriers are caused by contradictory agent—steward models of behaviour, whereas others are deficiencies of the SE sector in general. The study demonstrates that the SE financing gap is a complex problem that requires multifaceted solutions.

Museum visitors are not reflective of the diversity present in communities around the nation. In this study, we investigate the racial and ethnic diversity of art museum participants as well as the potential motivations and barriers to visiting a museum. Using the General Social Survey, we examine race and ethnicity and arts participation in the USA. We find Black individuals are less likely to attend an art museum than white individuals. Certain motivations and barriers to participating may explain part of the lack of diversity. We find Black and Latinx individuals are motivated to participate in art museums for cultural heritage reasons more than white individuals, but race and ethnicity are unrelated to perceiving admission fees as a barrier. This research highlights the urgency in the field to make museums more inclusive.