Cessation of Volunteering in Later Life: Managing long-term impacts for volunteers and volunteer managers of cultural heritage organisations

本研究将探讨志愿者和志愿者经理如何协商退出特定的志愿者角色，以及这对老年志愿者（65岁以上）和志愿者经理的生活可能产生的影响。人们在一生中从事不同形式的公民参与（包括志愿服务），通常是为了应对影响他们可用时间和资源的其他生命历程转变。虽然人们对公民参与的模式进行了研究，但对从志愿服务角色转到另一个角色的影响和决定转到另一个角色的因素还没有研究。公民参与被视为成功老龄化的一个重要方面。公民参与有不同的形式，志愿服务就是其中之一。志愿者在英国各地提供健康、社会和文化服务方面发挥着重要作用。在英国，65岁以上的志愿者比例最大。然而，许多70多岁的人由于各种与年龄有关的原因而停止了志愿服务，尽管他们可能会转向其他形式的公民参与。志愿服务有助于人们的幸福，并经常为以后的生活提供有价值的意义和身份来源。由该项目牵头的PI在英国进行的一项小规模研究表明，离开志愿服务可能是一种损失，有可能破坏志愿服务带来的好处。特别是当人们觉得个人或环境因素迫使他们停止时，即使他们不想停止。此外，研究发现，管理志愿者的退出给志愿者管理者带来了个人和职业上的挑战，而现有的政策并没有充分解决这一问题，但志愿者和志愿者管理者处理志愿者退出的方式可以改变这一举动对两个群体的影响。因此，在这一领域需要循证的专业指南。拟议中的项目将重点关注文化遗产组织的老年志愿者。该项目将探索志愿者离开志愿服务的经历，并将对他们的经历及其与更广泛的生活背景的关系产生丰富的理解。该项目还将探索塑造这一举措的组织背景和实践。我们将与志愿者和前志愿者合作，了解离开志愿服务对他们的长期健康有何影响。我们将与8个案例研究组织合作，这些组织捕捉了英国志愿者参与的遗产组织的广度。我们将采访志愿者、前志愿者和工作人员。然后，我们将对英国多个部门的志愿者经理进行全国性调查。这将使我们能够在更广泛的志愿者管理人员群体中测试案例研究的结果，并确定研究结果可转移到文化遗产以外的部门。我们将把我们的工作发现作为起点，与我们的项目合作伙伴进行反思性对话，目的是共同创建一个工具包，其中包含针对共同确定的情况商定的良好做法反应的全部内容。我们将与参与老年人工作的志愿者组织和机构分享这一点。该项目将为老年志愿者和管理他们的工作人员提供丰富的经验，因为他们从一种形式的公民参与（并可能进入另一种形式）。作为一个群体，老年志愿者本身就值得研究，但这个群体的见解将与其他在不同形式的公民参与之间移动的群体相关。从这项研究中获得的经验还将为新的志愿者管理实践提供信息，以改善英国和国际多个涉及志愿者的部门的志愿者和志愿者管理者的经验。

This study will explore how volunteers and volunteer managers negotiate moves out of a particular volunteering role and the impact that this can have in both the lives of older volunteers (aged 65+) and volunteer managers.People engage in different forms of civic participation (including volunteering) across the course of their lives, often in response to other lifecourse transitions which affect the time and resources available to them. While the patterns of people's civic participation have been studied, the impact of moving on from a volunteering role and the factors which shape the decision to move on have not. Civic participation is seen as an important aspect of successful ageing. There are different forms of civic participation, volunteering amongst them. Volunteers play an important role in delivering health, social and cultural services across the UK. Over-65s are proportionally the largest age-group of volunteers in Great Britain. However, many people in their mid-70s cease volunteering for a variety of age-related reasons though they may be moving onto other forms of civic participation.Volunteering contributes to people's wellbeing and often provides a valued source of meaning and identity in later life. A small-scale study in the UK, led by the PI for this project, suggested that leaving volunteering can be experienced as a form of loss which has the potential to undermine the benefits accrued from volunteering. This is particularly the case when people feel that personal or contextual factors are obliging them to stop even though they do not wish to.Furthermore, the study found that managing the cessation of volunteers created personal and professional challenges for volunteer managers which existing policies did not adequately address but the ways in which volunteers and volunteer managers handle this move out of volunteering can alter the impact of the move for both groups. Thus there is a need for evidence-based professional guidelines in this area.The proposed project will focus on older volunteers in cultural heritage organisations. The project will explore volunteers experience of moving out of volunteering and will develop a rich understanding of their experience and how it relates to the wider context of their lives. The project will also explore the organisational context and practices which shape this move. We will work with volunteers and ex-volunteers to understand how moving out of volunteering impacted on their wellbeing in the longer term.We will work with 8 case study organisations that capture the breadth of volunteer-involving heritage organisations in the UK. We will interview volunteers, ex-volunteers and staff. We will then carry out a national survey of volunteer managers across multiple sectors in the UK. This will enable us to test the findings from the case studies against the wider population of volunteer managers and establish the transferability of the findings to sectors beyond cultural heritage. We will use the findings of our work as the starting point for reflective conversation with our project partners with the aim of co-creating a toolkit of containing a repertoire of agreed good practice responses to commonly identified situations. We will share this will volunteer-involving organisations and agencies that work with older people.The project will provide a rich understanding of the experiences of older volunteers, and the staff managing them, as they move out of one form of civic participation (and potentially into another). As a group, older volunteers are worth studying in their own right but the insights from this group will be relevant to other groups of people who are moving between different forms of civic participation. The learning from this study will also inform new volunteer management practices to improve volunteers' and volunteer managers' experiences across multiple volunteer-involving sectors in the UK and internationally.