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

这项研究将探索志愿者和志愿者管理人员如何协商跳出特定的志愿服务角色，以及这可能对老年志愿者(65岁以上)和志愿者管理人员的生活产生的影响。人们在一生中参与不同形式的公民参与(包括志愿服务)，通常是为了应对其他影响他们可用时间和资源的生命过程转变。虽然人们已经研究了公民参与的模式，但从志愿角色转向的影响以及决定继续前进的因素还没有。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，其中包括志愿服务。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岁以上的人是志愿者中最大的年龄段。然而，许多70多岁的人出于各种与年龄相关的原因停止了志愿服务，尽管他们可能正在转向其他形式的公民参与。志愿服务有助于人们的福祉，并往往在以后的生活中提供有价值的意义和认同感来源。在英国，由该项目的PI领导的一项小规模研究表明，离开志愿服务可能会被视为一种损失，可能会破坏志愿服务所带来的好处。尤其是当人们觉得个人或背景因素迫使他们停下来的时候，尽管他们不想这样做。此外，研究发现，管理志愿者的停止给志愿者经理带来了个人和职业上的挑战，现有的政策没有充分解决这些问题，但志愿者和志愿者经理处理这一退出志愿服务的方式可以改变这两个群体的行动的影响。因此，在这一领域有必要制定基于证据的专业指导方针。拟议的项目将侧重于文化遗产组织中的老年志愿者。该项目将探索志愿者退出志愿服务的经历，并将加深对他们的经历及其与更广泛的生活背景的关系的理解。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，了解退出志愿者服务对他们长期福祉的影响。我们将与8个案例研究组织合作，这些组织捕捉到志愿者的广度--涉及英国的遗产组织。我们将采访志愿者、前志愿者和工作人员。然后，我们将对英国多个行业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管理人员群体中测试案例研究的结果，并确定这些结果是否可以转移到文化遗产以外的部门。我们将利用我们的工作结果作为与我们的项目伙伴进行反思对话的起点，目的是共同创建一个工具包，其中载有对共同确定的情况作出商定的良好做法反应的汇编。我们将与志愿者分享这一项目--包括与老年人合作的组织和机构。该项目将提供对老年志愿者以及管理他们的工作人员的丰富了解，因为他们正在摆脱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，老年志愿者本身是值得研究的，但这个群体的见解将适用于在不同形式的公民参与之间流动的其他群体。从这项研究中学到的东西也将为新的志愿者管理实践提供参考，以改善志愿者和志愿者经理在英国和国际上涉及多个志愿者部门的体验。

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.