Appreciating What Matters: The many dimensions of volunteer value

Click HERE to view this PhD Defence online

Volunteering is broadly embedded in our communities. Academics, practitioners, and media often speak to the value volunteers add to society. Most of the time they do so in financial terms calculating cost savings, based on the argument that volunteers can replace paid staff within an organization. However, volunteers are also described as ‘the glue of our country’, suggesting they are valuable beyond the mere financial. One of the main goals in writing this dissertation was to challenge the simplistic financial take on volunteers and to explore, in much nuance, how volunteers create value in different ways (in comparison to paid staff), and thus become influential beyond being a cheaper replacement for paid staff. The chapters in this dissertation all showcase this in different ways and explore how to move away from a cost-saving approach and towards a value-based framework to make more effective and efficient staffing decisions within volunteer-involving organizations.