How structural factors promote instrumental motivations within youth volunteering : a qualitative analysis of volunteer brokerage

This article presents a structural, multi-level analysis, showing how volunteering policy, specific volunteering programmes and operational practices in volunteer brokerage organisations promote instrumental motivations in young volunteers. Through evidence drawn from a qualitative study of youth volunteering brokerage workers and volunteering policy-practitioners, it is shown how young people are increasingly pressured into volunteering, and into seeing volunteering as primarily a route into employment. Volunteer recruiters do not challenge these structural factors; instead, employability and easing the transition to work and university form a large part of 'selling' volunteering, with young people encouraged to trade their time for experience. It is concluded that these findings fit into a wider theoretical narrative about the changing nature of volunteering, and have the potential to create significant problems for volunteer-involving organisations.