Understanding spontaneous volunteering in crisis: towards a needs-based approach of explanation

ABSTRACT

Despite the fast growth of informal, episodic, and individualistic style of volunteering, most existing volunteering literature has been driven by the traditional model of volunteering with less focus on informal volunteers’ psychological needs and experiences. This paper presents a case of spontaneous volunteering in North America where volunteers self-organized to collect and transport oversea charitable donations to support Wuhan hospitals at the outbreak of COVID-19. Based on the Volunteer Process Model and thematic coding analysis, this study examines the antecedents, experiences, and consequences of spontaneous volunteering with a focus to understand volunteers’ psychological needs, experiences, and perceptions in the volunteer process. Findings from this study reveal a major theme of self-helping motivation through engaging in other-helping endeavors during crisis time. The paper calls for more attention to assess and understand the psychological needs of volunteers in time of crisis, and how such needs may drive or influence volunteering experience and volunteering consequences.

KEYWORDS:

• Spontaneous volunteering
• crisis and disaster response
• COVID-19
• psychological needs of volunteers

Notes

¹ “WeChat” is an instant messaging smartphone application widely used among Chinese and oversea Chinese, which enables one-on-one instant messaging, group messaging with a limit of 500 people, instant video call, voice call, and WeChat Moments function that resembles social media posts.

Additional information

Funding

The work is not supported by any funding. The author claims no conflict of interest