Introduction/Motivations
My project has evolved significantly over time. It began as a project aiming to encourage local Multnomah County residents, including Lewis and Clark college students, to volunteer at Tryon State Park. As I did research on volunteering at the park, my interests shifted. I realized I couldn’t just talk at people and convince them to volunteer somewhere, and instead I wanted to create a dialogue about why people do and do not volunteer in the first place. After further research, this idea shifted to my finalized project idea. I wanted to try to understand why environmental volunteering appears to be such a low priority nationally by encouraging people think about their concepts of environmental volunteering and if that contributes to whether or not they volunteer in what they consider to be an environmental context. From there, I could determine if the definition of environmental volunteering needs to be re-framed to be more interdisciplinary. I wanted to work with this idea because volunteering has been a huge part of my life, and I have often ended up working for organizations that consider themselves environmental organizations. I know my perceptions of how to define environmental volunteering has changed and broadened since taking ENVS 160 and ENVS 295, and I was curious to see how other people’s ideas differed from my own. I geared this project towards young (18-24 years old) people, because their demographics on volunteering is the lowest of all ages. I distributed a survey to 62 people to learn about these perceptions, and I created an exhibit based on my interpretations of my scholarship and the survey results that aimed at making people think about what they consider environmental volunteering and if they prioritize this.
To see my all of my blog posts throughout the project, click here
What: Environmental Scholarship
I asked why people weren’t participating in environmental volunteering in the United States when I researched volunteering demographics and learned that volunteering for environmental organizations made up only 2.2% of total US volunteering (US Bureau of Labor Stats 2016). When I first read that statistic, I thought, ‘how do we even define environmental volunteering?’, so I did some research, which eventually brought me to Richard White’s A Problem With Purity. This text discussed that humans have a desire to separate the environment from themselves, making the environment ‘the other’ to us (Richard White 1999). I thought maybe that would mean that to a lot of people, environmental volunteering is specifically about anything not directly relating to humans, such as animals, non-human inhabited land, the ocean, and the atmosphere. And so maybe people don’t participate in environmental volunteering as much because it isn’t immediately a threat to us/ is not directly related to us. I found an article supporting this idea, which was about volunteers of color not volunteering for environmental organizations because they feel the more pressing need to do pure social justice work because those issues are felt now and immeadiatley by human beings (Anderson 2017).
Yet, I thought, virtually all of the current problems associated with non-human organisms/non-human inhabited land and water are directly related to humans, so maybe at least some people feel like environmental volunteering is much more interdisciplinary, and not just a separate entity from us. I researched and found information that supported this idea. A journal discussed how people feel the pressure to volunteer for environmental organizations because the effects of climate change bring people guilt; they know that they have been contributing to the greenhouse effect, deforestation, species extinction, etc, so they feel a pressure to give back and therefore volunteer for environmental organizations (Lill et al, 2006). Although people feeling pressured to volunteer in an environmental context wasn’t directly reflected in the US Bureau of Labor Volunteering statistics, I was interested in the idea of a more inclusive definition of environmental volunteering that involved humans as an integral part of that definition. I knew I wanted to ask my audience exactly how they defined environmental volunteering to determine if this affected how they prioritized their volunteering. This idea led me to a journal about integrative/hybrid volunteering, which stated that volunteering is incredibly complex and should not be categorized [into things such as environmental, social, political, educational, etc] (Hustinx 2010). I realized that maybe by using this idea of not clearly categorizing environmental volunteering, people could potentially be more drawn towards engaging in volunteer work that includes environmental issues.
*See references below*
Who: Target Audience
My target audience is young, college aged people. I got this idea after doing some research on general volunteering demographics, and I noticed that people aged 18-24 volunteered the least out of all age groups in 2015 (Bureau of Labor Statistics 2016). I wanted to understand why this was the case, especially because volunteering for environmental organizations took up only 2.2% of total volunteering for all age groups including this one (Bureau of Labor Statistics 2016). I decided that the lack of high volunteer rates and the fact that my project was centered in a college made my choice of whom to engage with clear.
I engaged with almost 62 college aged students residing in Minnesota and Oregon, with the majority being located at Lewis and Clark College for the first part of my project, and 10 college aged students from Lewis and Clark College for the second part of my project. I engaged with these people through Facebook and in person at Lewis and Clark College. I moved to Oregon from Minnesota a few years ago, so many people I communicated with on Facebook were from Minnesota and Oregon. I live at Lewis and Clark College, so the base for my exhibit was there, which is why my exhibit engaged with exclusively Lewis and Clark College students. I got a variety of information and perspectives from a variety of people in the same general age range of 18-24 years old.
How: Connecting Actions
My first connecting action was my survey. I created a set of questions geared towards first getting general information about an individual such as age, race, gender, and economic standing. Then, I asked about their volunteering habits, such as how often they volunteer now and in the past, what specific categories they believe their volunteering falls under, and if they enjoyed their experiences. Finally, I asked how they define environmental volunteering, how important they feel it is, whether they have an interest in it, and if they feel that it should be a priority in their lives. I got 62 responses to this survey, and gathered very interesting information that you can check out here. After I distributed this survey out and looked at my results (discussed in results section), I knew that I wanted to delve deeper into the information I got, and learn more about how individuals define environmental volunteering as well as which volunteer opportunities are more likely to be considered environmental. Therefore, I created an exhibit as well.
I made an exhibit to understand where the line is drawn to define volunteer work as environmental, and where that line is prioritized for a given individual. I asked people who approached me to mark which of the fifteen fake volunteer organizations they think are environmental, and which they would want to volunteer for. I made some organizations appear clearly environmental (based on the survey responses), such as the Coalition for Environmental Justice and GREENR, or the Global Restoration of Earth’s Ecosystems and Natural Resources. However, the other thirteen incorporate multiple pure categories of volunteering, such as both educational and environmental action in the Teachers for Teaching organization. I was interested to see if people could see that environmental volunteering could fit into any of the organizations even though social justice, politics, education, etc also could, and I was interested to see if people were interested in the organizations they checked off as environmental. I engaged in conversation with people who were willing to talk to me about their choices or who asked questions about some of the other participant’s choices, which they were able to see. I set up this exhibit at the Lewis and Clark College Forest Dorms and the college Dining Hall for a few hours over the course of about a week.
*see results to these two connecting actions below*
Project Outcomes
Results
The Survey– 62 people engaged in this survey. From the first part of the survey, the data of interest to me were that 99% of people had volunteered before and 92% enjoyed it. Also, 73% of people did it to help the organization they were working for, 41% of people did environmental volunteering primarily, and 36% enjoyed environmental volunteering the most. Although US statistics tell us that college aged people volunteer the least, 99% of people surveyed had volunteered before! And although only 2.2% of the total volunteering in the US is environmental volunteering, 41% of the people surveyed claimed that they did environmental volunteering the most! *click on survey link to view tables of data*
From the second part of the survey, the data of interest to me were that every single person surveyed defined environmental volunteering as something slightly different from the others, although some could be put into more general categories. Also, many definitions fit into forms of hybrid volunteering, and 74% of people said that they have volunteered in a way that fits their definition of environmental volunteering. I also thought it was very interesting that when asked to pick what they thought was environmental volunteering, nearly everyone (60-89%) chose volunteer descriptions with words such as science, scientist, species, climate change, and litter in them, but only 2-20% chose volunteer descriptions with words/phrases such as teaching science, building a school, improve living conditions, food bank, Trump protest, and helping artists of color. This shows me that it is more clear to people what can be considered environmental volunteering when it appears purely environmental in nature, but when environmental volunteer opportunities start to include both environmental and educational or environmental and social justice/political work, not as many people can see the environmental nature of the volunteer opportunity. This really informed me that there needs to be a shift in the framework of how to define environmental volunteering.
The Exhibit– 10 people engaged in this exhibit. Everyone chose the organizations with the word environment or ecosystem as environmental volunteering, such as the Coalition for Environmental Justice and GREENR, but with the rest there was more discrepancy. However, all hybrid organizations were voted as environmental volunteering at least once. Two people selected every single organization as environmental volunteering. One of them told me they did this because:
“Environmental volunteering can mean different things to different people depending on their experiences with it, so why define it? To me, every one of these organizations affects either humans, animals, or land, so it affects the environment, so it’s environmental. That’s how I see it” -Anon
The other person said that they felt like every single one of those organizations in some way impacts the environment. The ones helping POC helped those who were at the mercy of environmental laws and dealt with more pollution issues than white people. The organizations involving teaching would teach children about science, nature, and land use among other things, which might lead them into environmental positions in the future. The ones about political protests are protesting many things including poor environmental regulations and shutting down National Parks. Everything eventually has an impact on the environment, so every volunteer opportunity that in some way improves the impact we have on the world is environmental volunteer work (anon). Others told me a variety of things, such as that they thought of environmental volunteering as something that helps animals, or that improves land quality, or that educated people about science, or that aids in the efficient use of resources or land for humans. This really showed me that ideas about what is environmental volunteering varies so much among people, and giving it a clear definition won’t be able to contain the vast array of ideas about how to define it.
Organization interest varied based on only past experience and major/passion, and choosing something as environmental volunteering seemed to have little impact on whether or not an individual was interested in volunteering there. For example, one person chose the journalism organization because, “That sounds so incredible! I’m an English major who really wants to be a journalist so I would absolutely love to do something that gives me experience in my field” -anon. *click on exhibit link to view data*
Implications/Assessment
This project did not thoroughly answer my questions about why environmental volunteer rates are so low in this country and how definitions of environmental volunteering influence whether or not people volunteer in an environmental context, but I never really expected this project to be fully able to answer these questions. These questions that I emphasized were mostly meant to develop my main idea, which was to get at how definitions of what counts as environmental volunteering are so different among young individuals, and how hybrid volunteering affects that definition and can potentially change how people define environmental volunteering. I consider this project an absolute success, because the engagement I had with others emphasized my main idea heavily. Everyone said something different when defining environmental volunteering, and some in the survey response section said they couldn’t even define it because it is too broad of a term to define and can fit into a lot of volunteer opportunities. By emphasizing the ideas of hybrid volunteering, of incorporating education, politics, social justice, art, environmentalism, science, etc all together into volunteering opportunities, we can expand on having more interdisciplinary experiences when volunteering, and potentially get higher rates of volunteering than ever before in this country. In the future, students could pick up my project and continue to work on engaging with youth and maybe other age demographics, to compare definitons of environmental volunteering across a wider range of people! Or, future projects based around my project could work more on defining hybrid volunteering to the audience and observing how that changes their definitions of environmental volunteering. Or maybe even future students could actually get students engaged in a hybrid volunteer opportunity to experience environmental volunteering in a more interdisciplinary context! There is so much more one can do with this project, and I am excited to see where it goes with future students.
References
Clary, E. Gil, and Mark Snyder. 1999. “The Motivations to Volunteer.” Current Directions in Psychological Science 8 (5): 156–59. doi:10.1111/1467-8721.00037.
Grimm, Robert, Kimberly Spring, and Nathan Dietz. 2007. “The Health Benefits of Volunteering.” Corporation for National and Community Service.
Hustinx, Lesley, Ram A. Cnaan, and Femida Handy. 2010. “Navigating Theories of Volunteering: A Hybrid Map for a Complex Phenomenon.” Journal for the Theory of Social Behaviour 40 (4): 410–34. doi:10.1111/j.1468-5914.2010.00439.x.
Lill, Alexandra, and Sarah Graber. 2006. “Human-Environmental Interactions.” Human-Environmental Interactions. Ecology Centre Kiel.
Lindsey McDougle Assistant Professor, School of Public Affairs and Administration (SPAA), Rutgers University Newark. 2017. “Why Environmental Groups Need More Volunteers of Color.” The Conversation. December 8.
McDougle, Lindsey M., Itay Greenspan, Femida Handy, Wiepking, Pamala, and Bekkers, René. “Generation Green: Understanding the Motivations and Mechanisms Influencing Young Adults’ Environmental Volunteering.” International Journal of Nonprofit and Voluntary Sector Marketing 16, no. 4 (2011): 325-41.
Mittlefehldt, Sarah., and Cronon, William. Tangled Roots : The Appalachian Trail and American Environmental Politics. Weyerhaeuser Environment Books. Seattle: University of Washington Press, 2013.
Paine, Angela Ellis., Steven Howlett, Meta Zimmeck, and Colin Rochester. 2010. Volunteering and Society in the 21st Century. Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan.
“Volunteering in the United States, 2015.” 2016. Bureau of Labor Statistics. United States Department of Labor.
White, Richard. 1999. “The Problem with Purity.” Tanner Lectures on Human Values.
Yotopoulos, Amy. 2017. “Three Reason Why People Don’t Volunteer and What Can Be Done About It.” Stanford Center on Longevity. Accessed December.
“Youth and the Environment.” 2003. World Youth Report.
ENVS 295 Individual Project 