Photo by Ismael Paramo on Unsplash

Volunteering is a wonderful way to give back and serve the organizations that do important work in your community, but volunteering can also be a powerful exercise to challenge yourself and subsequently boost your research skills. Yes, socially, we’re conditioned to “optimize” and “max out” our skills, abilities, and labor at every turn, and anyone with a hobby or a passion can probably recall hearing, “I bet you could make a lot of money doing that” or “Why don’t you turn that hobby into a business?” We’re bombarded with bids to maximize our wealth and influence, and the underlying assumption is that time given freely to other purposes that don’t enrich us financially is time wasted. However, learning how volunteering improves your own life—which naturally includes your work life—helps drive us past this hyper individualistic hustle culture.  

There are many different kinds of volunteer opportunities, but typically the process, whether working at a food pantry, cleaning up an outdoor public space, or helping out at any number of local organizations, involves setting aside your own specific interests and desires, and just doing the work you’re asked to do, whatever that may be. But, you might ask, what interesting opportunities could there be in moving boxes around or picking up trash in a park?

Photo by Joel Muniz on Unsplash 

Well, most volunteering events have some kind of social aspect. This might involve talking with other volunteers, getting to know some of the organization staff, or interacting directly with clients receiving services. Taking an ethnographic eye to these spaces gives us insight into all the subtle social interactions that make these events much more than just service transactions.  

Me personally, I like to arrive a bit early at any given volunteering gig to watch some of these interactions and get acquainted before things start moving. I watch how organization staff and seasoned volunteers talk about the layout of the event, illustrating the different ways they think about how to make clients and neighbors feel welcome as they move through and utilize the space. I also look at how community members approach and accept services; I look for clues to see who is new and nervous and in need of guidance and reassurance, or who is returning and looking for familiar faces. I look at fellow volunteers, some who are retirees hoping to give their time and strength to the communities they love, some who are volunteering as part of a court order and may feel differently about their service, and some who are volunteering because they have used the services previously and know how important it is to have someone understanding on the other end. With a curious and respectful eye, we can learn a ton from the various and brief situational relationships that occur in these spaces where so many different people come together.  

Working as a qualitative researcher means getting out into the world—oftentimes out of your comfort zone—and interacting with folks, refining your observation and empathy skills, and exploring the whys and hows of whatever phenomenon you’re investigating. Volunteering puts us shoulder to shoulder with people we might not regularly interact with, but who we nevertheless may carry assumptions about, and who may carry assumptions about us! I’ve found that volunteering can be an excellent way to interrogate biases and assumptions; when we face new situations and encounter real people in those situations, we can either look for the ways they match our assumptions (and reinforce our stereotypes) or we can more deeply think about what they say, how they act, what they do, and what values we might share. If we exercise our researcher abilities, we can let these situations challenge our assumptions and broaden our worldview.