Page 4641 - Week 14 - Thursday, 24 November 2005
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work force. Surveys by the ABS in Australia and other reputable research here and overseas all point to a fairly worrying trend, that is, that only one-quarter of the baby boomers are looking to volunteer in the future. These are mainly women who are looking to take on caring roles, which is good news. However, they report that they expect to be nurtured by their organisations of choice, which is not such good news as organisations find that very time consuming.
As to the other three-quarters, some do not plan to retire, remaining in the paid work force for as long as possible beyond the mid-60s; some will travel, study and occasionally tip their toe in the volunteer pool; and some will look after grandchildren, aged parents, et cetera. Those of the remaining three-quarters who do volunteer have flagged that professional management and flexibility are high on their agenda.
This trend is already causing community and government organisations that rely on volunteer staff severe headaches. Many home and community care organisations report difficulty in recruiting and maintaining their volunteer work force. Organisations such as community transport services and Meals on Wheels—who would have imagined that?—friendly visiting services, and schools with volunteers who work alongside children in reading programs are all suffering. This is worrying indeed as we face the ageing of our population and having more and more people with disabilities in our population. Added to that are the Howard government’s welfare-to-work impost and the IR changes, changes that threaten to alter the face of our community drastically, doing away with the weekend, for instance.
Fortunately, waiting in the wings is the corporate volunteer. This new volunteer has been around for some while in the Americas, Europe and Asia and is slowly emerging here. This is where the firm becomes the volunteer and donates staff time on an occasional or regular basis. The latter is obviously more helpful to organisations providing day-to-day care and services to aged people and people with disabilities or those with chronic illness. However, the former is well utilised by organisations such as Greening Australia in its extensive tree planting. It is hoped that these programs will fill the void being created by the changes to the regular volunteer work force. Hopefully, the employee volunteer will also swell the ranks, the person given encouragement by his or her boss to use flexitime to regularly volunteer in the organisations of choice.
Everyone remembers the great outpouring of human endeavour that occurred immediately in response to the January 2003 firestorm. Even today, hundreds of those volunteers continue to work in the recovery process. This phenomenon, called spontaneous volunteering, whilst proof yet again that Canberra cares, created considerable confusion at the time. No-one anticipated that that would occur; there was no effective plan in place, no way to channel this human tide.
This is not unusual after a disaster. Post-September 11, one of the lessons learnt there was the need to manage the spontaneous volunteer, or walk-up volunteer as they were sometimes known. The conventional wisdom up to that time, and still held in many places round the world, is to send them away. Guess what? They come back, and back again and again. What a waste of everyone’s time and what a waste of goodwill and potential.
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