The Privilege of Volunteering: Navigating the Mess That is Free Labor

One of my primary responsibilities while working at 826CHI has been to look into volunteer outreach efforts and to come up with strategies to strengthen our volunteer base. A consideration included within the language of this assignment was “For 826CHI, it is crucial for our volunteer population to reflect our student population”. This was a sentiment that I took and take very seriously. At 826CHI we primarily serve low income communities and communities of color; the majority of the students we work with are Black and brown and come from under-resourced schools. Additionally, during my first week working at 826CHI my supervisor shared some literature with me that addressed the identity dynamics and cultural baggage attached to volunteerism and volunteer culture. Since then, I have been grappling with the question of how to do my job as thoughtfully and intentionally as possible: how to navigate the messiness of volunteerism and address demographic challenges. I will lay out some of these thoughts and considerations in this blog post, citing a few articles that have helped me think through this complex topic. The first essential question I considered was, which kinds of people were already volunteering?

Who Volunteers?

Before I get into this section I want to acknowledge that these patterns are not universal and that there will be exceptions to every “rule”, your experiences may differ from those below. However, I think it is still important to take these demographic and cultural patterns into account when thinking about volunteerism

The first articles I came across which addressed identity and volunteerism were written using a feminist lense and addressed disparities across gender lines. While these articles were not gender expansive and relied on binaristic notions of gender, I think they are still helpful when parsing the relationship between the constructions of masculinity/femininity and the idea of volunteerism. The article “Why Women Volunteer for Tasks That Don’t Lead to Promotions” by Linda Babcock, Maria P. Recalde and Lise Vesterlund offers a more clinical perspective on the likelihood of men and women to volunteer for “non-promotable tasks” within the workplace. The authors define non-promotable tasks as “those that benefit the organization but likely don’t contribute to someone’s performance evaluation and career advancement”. They cite several studies (Irene De Pater and colleagues; Sara Mitchell and Vicki Hesli; and Joya Misra and colleagues, as well as many others) which all find significant differences in how work is allocated, with women spending more time than men on “non-promotable tasks” and less time on “promotable” ones. The article “Why Don't Men Volunteer as Much as Women?” by Dan Kopf details similar gender dynamics but more directly addresses these dynamics in the more traditional notions of volunteering at non-profit and community organizations outside of the workplace. Kopf notes that these dynamics often boil down to cultural expectations. Men are conditioned in America to devote all of their energies to “generating income”. The sociologist Hiromi Taniguchi found that when men and women are out of work, women increase their time spent volunteering, while men spend all of their time looking for work. And so here we see how the ideology of capitalism infects notions of gender, how specific expectations are placed on different groups of people. Men are taught that volunteering is a waste of time because it does not advance their career, it does not enhance their ability to feed their families or to generate capital for their bosses, executives etc.

While I found these articles informative, I felt that they were lacking intersectionality and flattened the experiences of women in the workplace. Luckily, the next article I found: “Rethinking Work-Life Balance for Women of Color (And how white women got it in the first place)” by Kimberly Seals Allers provided a lot of the nuance that I was looking for. It did, however, problematize and critique the perspectives offered in the earlier articles I read… one step forward, two steps back (just kidding, this process of researching and re-examining is absolutely critical to developing good ideology and ethics, progress is not linear). Allers directly addresses mainstream feminist perspectives, writing that:

“The pushback against institutionalized work patterns and the movement for work-life balance is an emerging, yet critical wing of feminism that is long overdue. But this wave can’t ignore the unique circumstances of women of color nor the socioeconomic dynamics of how white women came to even begin to have the conversation about work-life balance in the first place. Throughout history, white women have used the labor of women of color to reduce their own domestic burden and free themselves up for corporate and civic pursuits. Simply put, the labor of Black, Hispanic and Asian American women has raised white women’s standard of living.”

This sentiment really resonated with me and put into perspective the fact that while women (mostly white women) may disproportionately volunteer their time and labor, volunteering is a privilege in and of itself. As Hiromi Taniguchi puts it, volunteering is “a privilege as well as a responsibility.” People who find themselves in poverty or struggling to find a job are unlikely to feel that they can spend time and effort volunteering. And so, many of the feminist thrusts towards workplace equity and work-life balance for non-men have left behind working class folks and people of color. It is well documented and acknowledged that class and race in America are intimately intertwined. I will not be giving a history lesson on racial dynamics in this blog post to explain why this is the case (there are many resources on the internet that do just that) but it is something I want to acknowledge before I engage with the text further. I would also like to acknowledge that many of these disparities also affect white working class women, particularly in rural contexts (albeit with a much different history and without the realities and legacies of slavery, colonialism and mass incarceration). It is important to recognize how women of color and working class women in general often have a different relationship with labor and leisure than their white and/or wealthier counterparts. Sociologist Evelyn Nakano Glenn points out that “Ironically, many white women fulfilled White society’s expectation of feminine domesticity only through the domestic labor of their servants, who were women of color”. White women had money but wanted more time. Black and brown women needed more money. White women are calling for time to mother, but black women still need money to mother. And as Kimberly Seals Allers notes, “while the male-female pay gap has been slowly decreasing, the pay gap between white women and black women is the fastest growing income inequality there is, according to a report by the Economic Policy Institute”. There is still the cultural stigma around taking time off to mother or to volunteer or even for more leisure—something Black and brown women have never felt free to do. And so once again we can see how both racial and gendered expectations are at the mercy of capitalism’s social and cultural weight. While it is unfair that certain groups of people are expected or compelled to volunteer, those people need to have a certain amount of wealth, cultural capital, material resources etc in order to comfortably spend their time engaging in unpaid labor in the first place. With this information I felt like I had a better understanding of who was volunteering: white women. Through my experiences with volunteers at 826CHI I also realized that students and retirees were other big volunteering demographics. This, however, still made sense to me because these are people who aren’t working full time but also aren’t subject to the same set of economic pressures as people who work to survive.


While I felt empowered by this information, I was also feeling more disillusioned than ever. Is unpaid labor ethical at all? How can we even begin to address these huge structural issues through our outreach and volunteer management efforts? It felt futile to even be pondering such abstract ideas when small organizations such as 826CHI simply don’t have the money or capacity to function without the labor of volunteers in the first place. In an ideal world everybody would be adequately compensated for their labor but what do we do in the meantime? I decided that partnering with identity based cultural organizations and institutions, especially targeting students of color who may have more time on their hands is one way to “diversify” our volunteer base. Other than that there was a sense that “beggars can’t be choosers” and who are we to reject people from volunteering with us just because they are white.

Why do People Volunteer?

Once I had this realization (and at the same time as I was still working towards diversifying our volunteer base) I asked myself the second important question other than “who is volunteering?” and that is “why are these people volunteering?”. It became just as important for me to ensure that the people who work with us are there for “the right reasons”. 826CHI already does an amazing job at this. During our “New Volunteer Orientation” we have new volunteers participate in an activity called “The Power Flower”. This activity forces volunteers to think about their own identities and backgrounds and then contrast those identities with the populations and communities we serve. Volunteers are then expected to discuss how these identities and experiences may interact with those of the students they are working with. How do these differences or similarities create a power dynamic in relationships? I was floored when I first witnessed this activity and I think that 826CHI is an outlier here, that more organizations should be doing similar work to educate their volunteer bases.

The final article I will be citing here is “Accomplices Not Allies: Abolishing the Ally Industrial Complex from the website ‘Indigenous Action’.” This write-up has been instrumental in my understanding of “why people volunteer” and even why people engage in non-profit or community work in general. I think it is important to introspect and problematize our intentions as we navigate our work and our lives always. Accomplices Not Allies lists several problematic and oppressive “ally” archetypes that need to be challenged within activist and social sector circles. One archetype that felt particularly important as I was engaging in and learning about “non-profit work” during this fellowship, was the archetype of the “nonprofit capitalists (who) advance their careers off the struggles they ostensibly support”. This sentiment really validated some of the reservations I have had about non-profit work in general. I think I have been lucky at 826CHI and I can tell that almost all the people I have worked with really do care about the students and the communities we serve. It certainly helps that we have an incredibly diverse staff and a very community oriented culture, but I think “careerism” and too much pride is always something to be checking, introspecting on and problematizing in ourselves and our organizations. Another archetype, one that we explicitly condemn at 826CHI are the “mission trip” style volunteers. These are volunteers and staff who “carry romantic notions of oppressed folks they wish to ‘help.’ These are the ally ‘saviors’ who see victims and tokens instead of people”. Nobody should be organizing, volunteering or doing community work in order to feel better about themselves, “find themselves”, play “savior” or assuage their own white guilt. The author of Accomplices Not Allies says it best here:

“Even if never admitted, guilt & shame generally function as motivators in the consciousness of an oppressor who realizes that they are operating on the wrong side. While guilt and shame are very powerful emotions, think about what you’re doing before you make another community’s struggle into your therapy session. Of course, acts of resistance and liberation can be healing, but tackling guilt, shame, and other trauma require a much different focus, or at least an explicit and consensual focus. What kind of relationships are built on guilt and shame?”

Be wary of volunteers and coworkers who make struggles out to feel like an “extracurricular activity” that they are getting “ally points” for.

Concluding Remarks

Ultimately we need to be working towards being “accomplices” and “comrades”, we need to struggle together, to build trust in one another. Notions of the “ally” as separate from the “oppressed victim”: of the volunteer tutor as separate from the student, these dynamics defeat us all. While there may not be universal solutions or easy answers to many of these challenges and questions, I hope that thinking through this with me has at least given you the framework to think critically about outreach and volunteer management in general. I know I will be taking all of these lessons with me long after this fellowship.

Works Cited