With the expeditious changes that are affecting and transforming our society, it is becoming increasingly complex to manage our communities and consequently the impact is that some may fall by the wayside.

Most probably, we would agree that a society that is committed to community development is one that sustains itself on citizen participation. The notion of community in itself commands increased involvement aligned with active dialogue thus combating powerlessness and promoting shared values and robust communities.

One of the biggest resources this country prides itself on is the voluntary sector, which is a crucial activity if we want to keep the oxygen flowing in our society and want our neighbourhoods to keep functioning. 

The third sector is a major pillar in our social welfare system for so many reasons one of the over arching motives being that it cuts down on costs for the State, as volunteers by their very nature, are defined as ‘… person (s) who provide unremunerated services through or for a voluntary organisation’(Voluntary Organisations Act 2007 – Cap. 492 of the Laws of Malta).

On top of that, volunteering gives excellent targeted and specialised social services and guarantees a social policy that is grounded and not missing out on the less visible populations in our society. 

Volunteering contributes immensely to ensure we have cohesive societies. It helps create bonds of trust, adds to the volunteer’s personal development and also serves as the ‘nursery’ for those interested in taking up their ‘helping’ passions professionally, namely social workers, doctors, teachers, support workers and nurses, amongst others.

Essentially, volunteering is all about participatory governance and engaged citizenship and how these link up together. It is clear that two very important issues are at the heart of volunteering; ‘space’ (or ‘opportunity’) and ‘networking’.

Locally, people have repeatedly shown that ‘voluntary work’ is considered a value and an essential element in developing both one’s own individual and societal conscious. As a nation we hold in high regard people who have committed themselves to ‘a cause’. We need to recall that welfare emerged from the need to negotiate and reinvigorate the social responsibility for collective needs.

Volunteering is a manifestation of benevolence, goodwill and compassion towards all those at the fringes of society. Social and community operators have developed myriad initiatives to meet the imperative of help for the casualties of the economic and social system.

Volunteering also helps expand our moral currency. It is the road map that defines and develops this cognizance. It’s another path that leads towards full citizenship and societal engagement.

What is exciting is that lately in our country we seem to be moving away from ‘a charitable helpless model’ to ‘a forward-looking helping model’. It was an effort that saw at the forefront the forthcoming principles of ‘help’ versus ‘helplessness’, ‘solidarity’ versus ‘belittling’ and ‘participation’ versus ‘competition’. In more ways than one, voluntarism started taking on and complementing the government’s welfare responsibilities, minimising social tensions and going against the grain of community deterioration.

The spine of a healthy community lies in the inclusion of all and we probably agree that volunteering is one way of guaranteeing this! Citizenship participation is a lynchpin in the whole debate on social cohesion. All citizens need to feel part of their community rather than wait compliantly for an opportunity to come their way, before being able to influence the matters that concern them.

That is why volunteering takes on a bigger significance than just ‘do-gooders’ giving some time to people in need.

But if we are not careful, the voluntary sector will find itself in a predicament.

The way volunteering is being developed raises important questions (and a few eyebrows) about the challenges being experienced when it comes to independent governance in relation to state power. NGO self-governing might be in jeopardy because most funding essentially comes directly from government through selection criteria developed by the state itself. The same can be said of projects that are EU-funded, where it is the EU bureaucracy that takes the decision on where the money goes, which projects are considered a priority and so on and so forth. Apart from that, the discourse around partnerships, whilst in many ways noble, might be more of a discourse around controlling the volunteering agenda. Taking away the core magnetism, that is to say, impulsivity, impetuousness and spontaneity of this phenomenon is dangerous. If the State gets over-involved through funding or pseudo-partnerships or even poaching of people from the sector, this might contribute to the beginning of the end for the third sector. So whilst dialogue should be strategic, we should keep distinct involvement between the state and NGOs because they are equally crucial and central to governance. Volunteering needs to have the breathing space and freedom to operate and whilst collaboration with the State is of the essence, we need to establish operational boundaries to keep both well-defined. 

We also need to make sure that we are not pressurising NGOs into getting too organised thus hindering them from the freedom, lack of restrictions and sovereignty to take initiatives. Volunteers must never have that spontaneity stifled. Social operators, community leaders and social activists should be engrossed in policy and strategy development whilst the state’s primary role is to focus on policy co-ordination and standards regulation.

Where people feel a sense of belonging, communities become safer and healthier places to live in. The opposite is also true, in that over-dependent communities are, by definition, unable to take responsibility for themselves and often contribute to their own socio-economic woes.

Having said all that, we need to replenish our voluntary sector. 

If our model of volunteering will;

•             keep going in the direction of ‘pressurising’ post-secondary students to visit services and institutions as part of their sixth form, University, MCAST studies or else they might fail their study credits;

•             if we are going to create more checks than provide ‘legroom’ for inventiveness;

•             if we are going to allow the state to simply fill in the gaps it can’t handle with the NGOs without allowing the latter the opportunity to manoeuvre and take the service in the direction they think is best, volunteering risks obliteration.

Maximising engagement of volunteers in our society and stocking up this valuable resource is of decisive importance. The best way to have more volunteers is to allow the natural, unprompted and amorphous nature of volunteering to thrive. If it gets too claustrophobic, too organised, too structured we might start losing out on such an important resource.