Three Million Volunteers Useful to Italy
Charities and volunteering, in the sense of free, organized work done in service to others, are part of the Italian historical tradition. Social engagement has taken different names through history: Misericordie in the 1200s, le Dame della carità in the 1600s, Pubbliche assistenze in the 1800s.
Today the 3.2 million Italian volunteers represent the work of 385,000 functional employees that would need to be hired to do the same amount of work. In addition, there are 630,000 salaried employees working for non-profit organizations. Basically, it's like there were in Italy a million people working for the common good every day. By adding the economic value of volunteer work (almost €8 billion, calculated at substitution cost) to the revenues of non-profit institutions (about €38 billion), we get the equivalent of more than 4% of Italian GDP at market prices.
The economic crisis has highlighted the structural role of non-profit actors (although they address problems, not causes). Data about this reality at work say that volunteer work is part of Italy and that its direct social intervention is also good for the economy. Today a typical volunteer gives qualified and professional time to disadvantaged people in a virtuous exchange of give and take based on trust. From an economic point of view, volunteering is about producing efficient and effective services and non-simultaneously exchanging, albeit in a proportional fashion, reciprocity and economic vs metaeconomic values according to a social entrepreneurship logic. Beware, however, that in our society relationships based on reciprocity keep being confused with the exchange of equivalent values on the market based on price. We must overcome both the notion of free work as useful to the compassionate face of neoliberal capitalism, and the idea of volunteers as the spare tire backing up the public sector.
Being a volunteer means performing a work of service and reciprocity that goes beyond the single individual, and that functions and develops maximum effectiveness if embedded in structured organizations which we shall call not-for-profit social firms, as part of a tripolar system also based on private for-profit firms and government agencies.
Volunteer work performed within a non-profit social firm must become ever more professional, since it requires skills and abilities in the service of reciprocity aimed at, directly or indirectly, as part of a juridically, inistitutionally, and business-structured organization that produces services or goods destined to people in general, segments of the population, and other organizations in need. These are the clients of volunteer organizations. Doing volunteer work means to be free from traditional job constraints, but also to donate one's own free time to social, welfare, health, artistic, cultural causes. Volunteers do welfare work and reduce the complexity of daily problems experienced in dealing with government institutions.
Clearly there is a paradox implicit in the notion of "work given for free" in a society that is regulated by money and greed (in which financial reward is a measure of one's status and importance of the job done) and this affects both the subjective, individual aspects of volunteer work (motivation, expectations, sense of belonging), and the ways of managing unpaid human resources. The problem is how to obtain from volunteers integrated organizational behavior, in absence of the traditional controls and incentives for individual performance (career rewards, job sanctions etc.).
However, the role of the volunteer worker must be seen in terms of that of a functional employee who, although unsalaried, works for a social enterprise that must know how to best manage his/her abilities. So that volunteers can become fundamental actors of a more useful Italy.