Study needed on effects of student volunteering
Volunteers needed more than ever, Opinion, April 16
This year marks the 20th anniversary mandating Ontario high school students to complete 40 hours of volunteer community service as a condition of graduation.
Half of the double cohort of 2003, and every student since 2004, has had to meet this requirement in order to receive their diploma. A Sept. 4, 2012 Maclean’s article suggested that, “Even when it’s mandatory, volunteering builds community and promotes a healthier society.”
Many volunteer organizations welcomed this change because it gave them a steady supply of youthful, unpaid help, but 20 plus years later, has this translated into more adults continuing to volunteer?
Clearly, the authors Mélanie Valcin and Megan Conway are saying that this is no longer the case in 2024. What has this “forced child labour law” done for the present state of adult volunteering in Ontario? In 1993, researcher and author Alfie Kohn showed in the book “Punished by Rewards” that people having intrinsic reasons to do something are much more likely to continue than those who do the same thing for extrinsic reasons.
I feel that we need an extensive study on what the effects of mandatory volunteer hours have actually had on adults. Are millennials and generation Z volunteering more than generation X and baby boomers?
What effect has 40 hours of mandatory volunteer service had on students in their future adult lives? Hopefully, there are researchers out there willing to do the necessary work to give us some informed answers.
Mike Miller, Milton
The problem isn’t really the lack of volunteers. The real issue is the increasing demand for unpaid labour.
The rise of neo-liberalism has given us decades of service cuts, increasing income inequality, homelessness and hunger. And that was before the climate crisis became blatantly obvious and the pandemic exposed massive holes in our ability to deal with public health issues.
We don’t need more volunteers trying to hold our society together. We need our governments to return to the postwar consensus that government’s main duty is the welfare of its citizens. We need government to tax the rich to pay for programs that remove the need for volunteers.
Volunteers can fill gaps, but no country should ever depend on unpaid labour.