Olympics organisers will recruit up to 70, general volunteers in what they say is the UK's biggest post-war volunteer recruitment campaign. Roles available to volunteers will range from ticket inspectors to uniform distributors.
The London Organising Committee of the Olympic and Paralympic Games Locog said the volunteers would be known as Games Makers , because they will "make the games happen". London Mayor Boris Johnson said the Games Makers had "a vital role to play in ensuring every visitor has the time of their lives". Sarah Salem, from Hackney in east London, who was planning to apply for the scheme, said: "I have one mission in my life and that's getting involved in the Olympics.
The year-old former nurse said she wanted to volunteer for the Olympics because "it would bring the young, the old, the disabled, and people from different ethnicities together. A day's volunteering will last eight hours and applicants must agree to work a minimum of 10 days at the Olympics or Paralympics, or a minimum of 20 days to work at both. Sports, medical, press operations and anti-doping volunteers have been applying for specialist roles since 27 July.
A short summary of this paper. Social inclusion through volunteering — a potential legacy of the Olympic Games,. Downloaded from soc. Volunteering: The Legacy co. This article examines the experiences of volunteers in a programme established as a legacy of the Commonwealth Games. Keywords Commonwealth Games, legacy, Olympic Games, social inclusion, volunteer Introduction Analysis of the legacy of mega-sporting events has focused on the economic benefits of urban regeneration and tourism Gold and Gold, ; Poynter and Macrury, ; Preuss, These events involve a considerable number of volunteers — the Sydney Olympics used 70,; the Beijing Olympics, , Auld et al.
Email: g. One aspect of this legacy is the potential enhancement of the employability of volunteers; the Pre- volunteer Programme associated with the Commonwealth Games was attributed with providing training and qualifications, although a lack of long-term monitoring makes it impossible to conclude how many volunteer participants moved into employ- ment as a result Smith and Fox, Social inclusion has been associated with volunteering programmes.
This article explores the relationship between social inclusion and volunteering through the experience of volunteers whose volunteering has been facilitated by Manchester Event Volunteers MEV — an organization established as a legacy of the Commonwealth Games and which has provided a role model. As the longest-running organization of its type, MEV provides a valuable example of how a volunteering legacy from a mega-sports event can contribute to social inclusion.
Social Inclusion — Competing Discourses Enhancing the employability of volunteers at mega-sports events is related to social inclusion because the dominant social inclusion discourse associates inclusion with employment.
Of course, to the extent that events promote employment through eco- nomic activity they would also contribute to inclusion in that way. Three competing discourses have been identified in policy Levitas, , implying respectively that inclusion can be achieved through a redistribution of income RED , a moral uplifting of the excluded MUD , and inclusion in the labour market SID. A discourse linking exclusion to poverty is based on an analysis of relative poverty as the prime source of exclusion, although this can be mitigated by good health, stable personal circumstances and frequent social contact.
The social contacts pro- vided by volunteering might mitigate the material disadvantages associated with poverty. Another view is that exclusion arises in society where identity and status are largely or most obviously associated with publicly visible consumption, which many people are unable to attain, and this is exacerbated by rising social inequality Young, This raises the possibility that volunteering could contribute to inclusion through providing a sense of worth and status independent of material wealth.
An example would be individuals Downloaded from soc. This discourse would promote volunteering as inculcating civic values, especially for young people.
The discourse Levitas identifies as dominant, SID, stresses the social integrationist function of paid work. Paid work is more than a means to material inclusion — in a Durkheimian sense it binds the individual to society through structural, cultural and moral ties. This discourse sees working life as synonymous with paid employment and as associated with full rights of citizenship. This view was reflected in the Greater London Authority review of the impact of the Olympic Games on volunteering, which noted that, at previous Olympics, there was little evidence of volunteer skills transferring to the post-Games economy.
An implication of the SID discourse is that volunteering cannot provide the same rewards as employment. The SID discourse has been criticized as ignoring the impracticality of the goal of achieving full employment, as devaluing the experience of those retired from paid work, and as disregarding the consid- erable differences in circumstances of those who are employed Williams and Windebank, , thus preventing a broader consideration of what inclusion might mean.
There is a long history of proponents of such possibilities Veal, The Overlapping Rewards of Employment, Leisure and Volunteering Volunteering can be related to the dominant social inclusion discourse through under- standing the rewards of paid work and the extent to which they can be achieved through leisure. Volunteering can be regarded as a leisure activity as it is characterized by relative freedom of participation and the ability to opt out.
In understanding the extent to which participation in leisure programmes con- ducted in the early s could provide a substitute for paid work for the unemployed, Glyptis drew on the work of Jahoda , a social psychologist who studied the effects of unemployment and identified five basic functions or needs which are generally fulfilled by employment. First, employment structures time by imposing organization on days, weeks and years.
Lack of such structure can lead to Downloaded from soc. Second, employment provides a regularly shared experience outside the context of the family, enlarging the scope of human relations. Third, employment provides a link to goals and purposes transcending those of the indi- vidual. The fourth area of fulfilment was in personal status and identity. The fifth basic need fulfilled by employment was to enforce regular activity.
And of course, a sixth reward of paid work — beyond these psychological needs — was that of a means to a livelihood. The main conclusions were that the experiences of the unemployed are varied, and in only a few instances did participation in the programme become a major life interest and thus a potential source of status and identity; all programmes lacked the degree of compulsion of paid work; and none could compensate for relative material deprivation.
More generally, work and leisure were experienced as a couplet — the lack of one affecting the experience of the other; and a lack of income would always restrict the ability to participate fully in a commercialized leisure market. The scheme which appeared to offer rewards closest to those of paid work was based around broader leisure interests than just sport, offering more scope for constructing an alternative life style.
This suggests a role for volunteering consistent with the transformative visions of Gorz and Rifkin, and with the benefits of volunteering Conner, while acknowledging that it still does not provide an income.
This is important but ignores the experience of many people who retire voluntarily, choose to do less paid work, or choose to do work outside the paid labour market. It could also be argued that the emphasis on paid work as the dominant source of self-identity and status is challenged by increasingly fragmented units of production; by the increasing uncertainly and change in society; and by identity being increasingly associated with consumption.
Its membership of over volunteers includes who have volunteered for events in the last two years. Events requiring volunteers are advertised through a website and newsletter. Interested volunteers contact MEV who passes their name and contact details to the event organizer. MEV directs volunteers towards over events annually. It was initially a continuation of a Pre-volunteer Programme Downloaded from soc.
Its objectives included Games Final Report, n. It soon became apparent that the project was filling an unanticipated gap in providing a service linking event volunteers to events. Continuing funding of the project in by Manchester City Council permitted it to take on volunteers only from this local authority area. MEV provides a basic induction course for volunteers, further training courses leading to a nationally recognized qualification in event management, a monthly news- letter including local job vacancies, and support with CV preparation.
Research Questions and Methods The main research questions were: how has volunteering helped some volunteers into paid work?
Individual in-depth interviews were conducted in with 16 volunteers sampled to represent a wide range of MEV experiences. Six interviewees had volunteered at the Commonwealth Games. This over-represented Games volunteers amongst MEV volunteers but enabled them to give a long-term perspective, including experience of volunteering at the Games.
The interviews focused on the rewards from volunteering and the relation of volunteering to paid employment. All interviews were transcribed. Interviewees were sent transcripts to confirm their approval of their use or to delete material. Content was analysed to identify where volunteering might contribute to employability; categories of experience corresponding to the five basic needs fulfilled by employment; and the relation of volunteering to income an employment reward leisure could not provide.
The analysis identified where volunteering might provide an alternative life style to paid employment. A postal questionnaire survey was distributed in June to all volunteers on the MEV database, eliciting usable responses. Although this appears to be a low response rate it represented 52 per cent of the database volunteers active in the last year, over-representing them in relation to all MEV members.
Sixty-four per cent of the questionnaire sample had joined MEV in or earlier, and 71 per cent had vol- unteered at the Games. Thus this sample also over-represented MEV members Downloaded from soc.
The questionnaire results are used in this article to report the employment status of volunteers. Results Twenty-six per cent of questionnaire respondents were over the age of 65 and a further 10 per cent between 60 and 65; 41 per cent were retired and 6 per cent were semi-retired.
Salem qualified as an Olympic Delivery Authority tour guide, and started showing groups around the park before it opened, "hospice groups, people from Stoke Mandeville suffering spinal injury, the IOC from the USA, the family of Jacques Rogge, the Olympic president.
I mean: imagine! Salem is telling me this story in the press room of the Olympic Park basketball arena, where she worked all last week "I also did an eight-week journalism course," she says, in passing.
She is wearing the distinctive red and purple shirt of the volunteers with particular pride. The 70, volunteers were christened "Games makers" when they signed up for the job, after being chosen out of , applicants. Anyone who visited any of the Olympics venues last week and encountered the enthusiasm of people such as Sarah Salem would not think the phrase at all inaccurate.
Some volunteers have been assigned to particular specialist roles — as osteopaths or linguists or building equestrian fences, acting as trampoline "spotters" or fencing judges — but most are simply there to point out directions, manage bus queues, or shout a welcome to visitors. At the start of the week, there was just a little British nervousness about some of this particularly apparent in the tentative use of megaphones. By about Tuesday, this had entirely disappeared.
If there was a fear before this Olympics began that it would be a corporatised, soulless event, the effort and enthusiasm of the volunteers have filled it with a likeably amateur and properly human warmth. People have volunteered for very different reasons. Many, such as Brett Akpan, a law student from Sheffield, who is marshalling at the basketball, are here just because, "it was always going to be a great place to be But many others, such as Sarah Salem, see volunteering as a genuine chance to change their lives, or to "give something back".
Jean Tomlin, head of human resources for the Olympic organising committee, says she was adamant from the start that volunteers would be as integral to the staffing of the Games as contracted workers, "a one-team approach". Their altruistic spirit is fundamental to the atmosphere of inclusion the Games have sought to foster. She takes inspiration from the "austerity Games" in London , "which first introduced widespread volunteering to the Olympic movement".
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