The new Volunteers

Since the 1960s, the number of people volunteering in Switzerland has been declining. This decline is attributed to social and technological changes. In our multi-option society, the range of choices available has grown continuously, making it increasingly difficult for people to commit to any single activity. Technological developments, such as television, which allows people to entertain themselves at home, have contributed drastically to this phenomenon of individualization and the decline of community life.

The digital world, however, has become far more collaborative than television’s one-way media street. It offers an unprecedented abundance of opportunities to meet people and get involved. Every day, millions of people provide the world with valuable information without being paid for it. Collaboration has become so easy that it is seen more as fun, so much so that we now speak of citizen collaboration rather than volunteering.

If volunteering is often associated with an altruistic dedication that remedies a dysfunction, such as distributing blankets to the homeless, collaboration, by contrast, has neither givers nor receivers of help. There are only participants who explore breathing spaces to conquer together. However, unlike traditional volunteering, which relies on an often unskilled workforce to carry out pre-defined and robotic tasks, the collaborative approach requires far more involvement, exchange and coordination.

Today, the future of citizen participation is moving towards micro-volunteering, in which people volunteer for just a short period and carry out small tasks that form part of a larger project. In this way, the basic human needs that guide our voluntary behavior to make things happen as a group are met, namely: autonomy, social relationships, skill development, decision-making and the meeting of challenges.

The new volunteers must therefore be part of a collective process while assuming an individual role and be recognized as full partners. According to Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi, this is known as “experiencing the flow”: an exhilarating feeling that arises from intense concentration, or when your skill level rises to meet a relatively difficult challenge. Achieving this state of flow makes people more creative, more productive, and happier, something a collective movement can only amplify.