Tan Jianguang: Volunteering requires "love" rather than "task"

Volunteering requires "love" rather than "mission"

Tan Jianguang

Recently, under the influence of some social hotspots, volunteer service is also involved, which has attracted great attention and discussion. For example, when there are incidents of bullying in primary and secondary schools, while discussing legal sanctions and mental health, it also involves how to develop volunteer services in primary and secondary schools to promote the personality growth of primary and secondary school students. However, there are two voices at the same time: one is to see the experience and perception of primary and secondary school students participating in volunteer service, which is conducive to enriching their minds and improving their personalities, and the other is to worry that volunteer service in primary and secondary schools will become task-based and formalized, which will increase the burden on students and parents. Recently, Shenzhen netizens complained to the "Leadership Message Board" of People's Daily Online, believing that the practice of "semi-compulsory" parent volunteers to go to and from school outside the school to maintain order is unreasonable and unrealistic, which has caused widespread discussion. For example, in various localities, there are also two voices in society to promote the return of party members to the community for "double registration" and to carry out volunteer service for party members: in some places, the volunteer service of party members does play a positive role in caring for and helping the masses and solving social problems; however, there are also some mere formalities and increased burdens, which party members think is an additional burden, and the community thinks it is an increase in trouble, and the masses also feel that "walking around is a formality and has no practical effect." "We analyze these different voices and different views in detail, in fact, they are not extreme views of one or the other, but targeted calls for solving the shortcomings and improving and adjusting. In fact, even the masses who criticize the "parent volunteers" for scheduling shifts do not deny the significance of volunteer service, but believe that it should not become a "task scheduling" that is mechanical and rigid, laboring and costly; and the controversy about the "double registration" of party members and participating in volunteer service is not to deny the positive significance of party members' volunteer service, but to think that too many index requirements and too many "punch cards" cause trouble and burden. Therefore, we should more widely and deeply publicize the volunteer spirit of dedication, fraternity, mutual assistance, and progress, so that more departments, more organizations, and more members of society can understand the voluntary and public welfare nature of volunteer service, and reduce task-based and formalized interference. We write articles for discussion and exchange, and provide reference for various departments and regions.

01Volunteering requires love and kindness

Volunteering requires love and kindness, sincerity and enthusiasm, and it is necessary to respect and stimulate the motivation in the hearts of volunteers. Therefore, on the one hand, the relevant management departments and volunteer service organizations should widely publicize the volunteer spirit of dedication, fraternity, mutual assistance, and progress to the whole society, so that everyone can feel that in addition to competing interests, they should also treat each other with kindness and help each other; on the other hand, they should discover and disseminate outstanding volunteers who sincerely serve and treat others with true affection, so that everyone can be moved, enlightened, and learn from examples. Xu Benyu, an excellent volunteer we all know, was a student from the countryside more than 20 years ago, and when he was studying at Huazhong Agricultural University, he needed to work part-time to support his living expenses. However, even if he was in difficulty, he used the only money he had to support other students and help those in need. Once, when he was working as a tutor on a work-study basis, he saw a copy of the "China Youth Daily", which published an article about the very poor school environment of children in poor mountainous areas of Guizhou. A demobilized soldier renovated a school building with a sustenance allowance, but the lack of teachers prevented students from learning. As a result, Xu Benyu went to the mountainous areas of Guizhou to teach in the summer, and continued to teach for one or two years after graduation, and then attracted and drove many "Benyu Volunteer Service Teams" to carry out teaching services in mountainous areas. From the regret of "wanting to do it but not doing it, and missing the opportunity" to the courage of "doing it if you want to do it, and not missing it", let groups of young volunteers dedicate love, help others, enrich themselves, and thrive. I think that volunteering is the kind of genuine motivation that comes out of love and comes from the heart, so that there is a real motivation to keep working hard and go deep into service.

02Volunteering is voluntary

Volunteers should have ambition and pursuit, but the initial desire to participate in volunteer service is still to be voluntary and autonomous, without coercion and pressure. Volunteering means that people start from their hearts, feel good about volunteering, feel good about volunteering to help others in society, and sincerely want to participate and contribute. Autonomy means that people can listen to their inner call in volunteer service, choose valuable and interesting service projects, and effectively help the social group. During our investigation, we found that there was a Qizhi Volunteer Service Corps in Guangzhou, which was composed of a group of volunteers who were enthusiastic about caring for mentally handicapped children 30 years ago, and was affiliated with the Youth Volunteer Association of the Youth League Municipal Committee. At that time, the team composed of the Qizhi team and several other non-governmental forces had a different management model from the youth volunteer team established by other units and the Youth League Committee. Other teams cooperate with the party and government departments and the Communist Youth League to carry out volunteer service activities, and these non-governmental teams belong to the "affiliation", and regularly report to the Youth League Municipal Committee and the Youth Volunteer Association on the service situation, and introduce the next service plan. The Youth Volunteer Association gave guidance, and suggested that the service projects that did not conform to the norms and were not suitable should be stopped; the service projects that were most needed by the society and welcomed by the masses were encouraged; and there were also some particularly valuable and effective projects, and the Youth League and City Committee also squeezed out some funds to support them. In this way, under the guidance and support of the Youth League Municipal Committee and the Youth Association, the "semi-affiliated" non-governmental teams such as the Qizhi Team have actively carried out diversified volunteer services. Today, the Qizhi Volunteer Service Team has grown into a huge team of more than 100,000 registered volunteers, although some of them have left Guangzhou to work in other places, but there are still quite a lot of active volunteers. On the one hand, the Qizhi team receives guidance and support from the Ministry of Social Work and the Municipal Committee of the Communist Youth League, and on the other hand, it independently explores and carries out distinctive and energetic volunteer services, which have a very great influence in society and are well received by the masses. We have surveyed the volunteers who visited the Enlightenment Team and asked why they would be happy to serve in this organization. They said, "There are role models and leaders here, and they are also very free to choose their own service projects and carry out service activities that they are interested in." "We have found that whether it is Beijing, Shanghai, Guangzhou, Shenzhen, Zhejiang, Jiangsu, Sichuan, Yunnan, etc., there are some such volunteer teams that have been recognized and supported by party and government departments and Communist Youth League organizations, and who have maintained voluntary and independent services, which are very vigorous and worthy of attention.

03Volunteering needs to be flexible and diverse

Many volunteers have complaints and dissatisfaction with volunteer service activities, and one of the prominent reasons is that they think that the form and content are single. In some places, volunteer service stays in cooperation with work requirements and waits for instructions from superiors, which is limited to task-based service activities, resulting in volunteers feeling worthless and not interested after participating a few times, so they participate less and less. To this end, it is necessary to adopt a variety of ways and means to enrich the activities of volunteer service and provide flexible and diverse opportunities for participation. We went to Chengdu to investigate and investigate volunteer services, and found that they are "from less to more, from coarse to fine" to continuously develop and enrich volunteer service activities, attracting more and more people to participate. More than 10 years ago, the most important volunteer service of "Love Youxi" was "One Man's Theater", that is, volunteers with cultural interests and specialties went to communities and rural areas to perform programs for the elderly and disabled people who were lonely at home, bringing happiness to special groups. Nowadays, "Love Youxi" has developed a large number of emerging volunteer service projects through party building leading volunteer service, social worker coordination volunteer service, and public welfare promotion volunteer service, which not only extends and enriches the content of caring for special groups, but also enlivens the cultural atmosphere for the community and rural people, as well as the service content of innovative experience for young people, and has the service content of community building and rural governance with strong professionalism. When we conducted our research, we saw that a large number of low- and middle-income people live in an ordinary community formed after the urbanization of the countryside, and the volunteers encouraged the residents to express their diverse wishes and carry out flexible activities. For example, there is a sentence in the wall painting that impresses us particularly deeply: "We are all fighting, we are fighting, we are all mixing life!" This is a true portrayal of people's lives, but also a true portrayal of young people's lives. We believe that volunteer service organizations will be more attractive and influential if they give full play to the creative enthusiasm of volunteers, give full play to the creative enthusiasm of the masses, and encourage them to conceive and develop rich and diverse service projects.

04 Volunteering needs to be motivated and regulated

In order to attract and encourage the broad masses to participate in and persist in volunteer service, it is particularly necessary to do a good job in incentive measures and normative systems. The incentive measure is to adapt to the diverse needs of volunteers, and introduce more and more, flexible and diverse feedback incentives, not necessarily material incentives, but also team incentives, psychological incentives, recognition incentives, honor incentives, and so on. The normative system is to improve the rules and regulations, so that volunteers can clearly "do good things", avoid violations of laws and regulations, and avoid causing risks and harm. Nowadays, in some places, volunteer service incentives are limited to two types: one is the award of awards and flags at commendation conferences, and the other is the exchange of points for rice and oil items. These are not enough, there are now various types of volunteers, including ordinary migrant workers, residents, as well as middle and high-end people such as experts, scholars, and senior executives, and the needs are very diverse, so it is necessary to develop flexible and diverse incentives. For example, Rongcheng City, Weihai City, Shandong Province, has explored the "volunteer + credit" incentive mechanism, which fully incorporates volunteers' participation in service and their contributions into the social credit system, which not only has honor incentives and material incentives, but also social recognition incentives, social security incentives, social development incentives and other preferential treatments, resulting in good social effects. Another example is Longli County, Qiannan Autonomous Prefecture, Guizhou Province, to explore the "Assign Points and Strive for Excellence" volunteer service incentives, and adopt diversified measures to allow rural people to actively participate in and contribute to rural revitalization and rural governance, so as to obtain incentives, such as points, evaluation, industrial support, development opportunities, etc., and win the response and love of the masses. To this end, we believe that volunteer service needs rich, diverse, effective incentives, and reasonable and effective norms in accordance with laws and regulations, so that it can develop and flourish and play a role.

05Volunteering does not need to be task-oriented

In the survey, we heard that many volunteers reported that volunteer service has become a "work task" and a "hard task". There are many reasons for this phenomenon. First, some departments and institutions are accustomed to assigning and arranging tasks, but they do not understand that volunteers are dedicated and willing to participate in service, and they are also accustomed to assigning tasks and inspecting and supervising volunteers and volunteer service organizations. Second, in order to obtain financial support from the management department, some volunteer service organizations simply adopt the method of undertaking tasks to promote volunteer service, so that the volunteers participating in the service have the feeling of "being assigned tasks". For example, with regard to the issue of "home-school cooperation and maintaining safety", which has recently caused heated discussions, it was initially found that some parents found jaywalking and parked vehicles indiscriminately when they sent their children to school, which not only caused safety hazards, but also caused traffic jams. Therefore, some parents voluntarily form a volunteer team to maintain safety and order, which is a very good form. Later, after discovering this typical experience, some places issued a document requiring all schools in the city to learn from it and carry out "home-school cooperation" traffic duty services. At the same time, some schools are under pressure to ensure accountability for safety, and parent committees are required to carry out parent shifts and shift services. As a result, the enthusiastic behavior of some parent volunteers gradually evolved into a "common task" for all parents, resulting in unbearable burdens and constant complaints. For this reason, we believe that what needs to be changed is this kind of task-based practice such as "scheduling duty", rather than canceling the voluntary voluntary volunteer service of students and parents. At the end of last year, when we participated in the evaluation of the Zhejiang Volunteer Service Project Competition, we saw a project that was very good. There is an old grandmother in Ningbo City, when she sent her grandson to school, she saw that some families in the neighborhood could not send their children to school, so she took one or two more children to school. Some other enthusiastic people saw the grandmother's actions and were willing to help families in need bring one or two more children to school. The general public appreciated this simple practice of volunteering and called it "sharing grandma", and it attracted national attention and praise. Therefore, we believe that we should encourage and support more volunteer-based volunteer services with love as the core, and effectively reduce the practice of "task-based" and "rigid shifts", so as to make volunteer service prosperous and vibrant.

06Volunteering does not need to be indexed

In recent years, the Volunteer Service Promotion Information Management System has been used to collect statistics on the number of volunteers, the number of volunteer service organizations, the number of volunteer service projects, and the degree of activity. This is the progress brought about by the development trend of informatization and digitalization, which has a good role in improving the efficiency of volunteer service and improving the level of scientific management. However, in some places, the management departments and volunteer service organizations simply understand digitalization as "quantitative" and more simply as "indexed", whether it is the number of people, organizations, projects, communication frequency, etc., they all design cumbersome and complex indicators, causing dissatisfaction and complaints from volunteers. While actively promoting the information management and digital development of volunteer service, we should also respect the personalized and humanized needs of volunteers, and do not turn caring and enthusiastic volunteers into "cold" numbers and indicators. More than 10 years ago, a member of the volunteer service management department in one area told me, "We have developed an information management system, and in the future, we can recruit volunteers to participate in the service, record and reward them, and we no longer need to call one by one, as long as the system is released, which is very convenient." After listening to this, although I appreciated their enthusiasm to explore informatization and digitalization, I also reminded, "Beware of some enthusiastic volunteers who will leave the volunteer organization because of the application of this system." More than a year later, the head of the department led the training and invited me to give a lecture, saying, "Professor Tan, unfortunately some of your key volunteers are rarely in contact with each other now, and they rarely participate in activities. "I analyzed that volunteers are all human beings, and there are special motivations and needs to participate in volunteer service. On the one hand, it is to dedicate love to help the social people, and on the other hand, it is to participate in the voluntary groups of friendship and mutual assistance, kindness and harmony, and enjoy the warmth and comfort of friendship in addition to the boring and competing jobs. "If you rely solely on the information system, no one takes the initiative to contact and communicate with the volunteers, and without greetings and encouragement, the volunteers will not feel warmth and will gradually become alienated. "I think that today, the innovation and development of volunteer service is very important, and I have just written an article on "Where is the "New Quality Productivity" of Volunteer Service", which encourages the development of informatization and digitalization, and brings new impetus and vitality through the combination of volunteer service and technological revolution. However, if you go to a narrow "index", simply use indicators to measure everything, and make volunteers feel that they are just "indicators" and "tools", rather than flesh-and-blood, emotional and humane individuals, they may not be able to feel warm, and they may gradually become alienated and alienated.

07Volunteering does not need to be formalized

Volunteer service needs to have a good form to promote publicity and promotion, and attract the participation of the public; volunteer service needs to be influential, create a social atmosphere, and promote social civilization. However, in some places, it has gone to extremes, resulting in the formalization of volunteer service, which has caused dissatisfaction and complaints among volunteers. In particular, some units are accustomed to "engaging in large-scale activities" and, whether it is necessary or not, they will make a big noise and waste money on the people. Some units in a certain place carry out civilized traffic propaganda and volunteer services to ease traffic order. However, when the volunteers of the unit drove to do the service, many vehicles occupied the auxiliary roads, making it more inconvenient for the masses to pass through vehicles and pedestrians. Some people took pictures of this situation and circulated it widely on the Internet, causing public opinion. We believe that the number of volunteers needed to carry out volunteer service activities should be determined according to the needs of the grassroots and the needs of the masses, rather than for the purpose of "creating momentum" and "making influence". For example, when we went to some communities to investigate, the community cadres said, "I don't like the so-called volunteer service of dozens or hundreds of people, so I come to the community to sweep the floor, see the elderly, and just leave." It took us half a day to clean up. The community cadre added, "We like small, flexible, and two-by-one volunteers to come to the community and do some practical and effective services according to the needs of the masses." For example, teaching the elderly to pay attention to the safety of electricity and gas, adding vitality to the beautification column of the community propaganda column, and so on. Now, more and more people don't like to "put on a show" and "build momentum", but like small and diverse volunteer services that do not interfere with the public and do not waste money and money. We must adapt to the needs and carry out precise activities, so that volunteer service activities can be effective and truly welcomed and supported by the masses.

08 Volunteering does not need to be overflowing

In the course of our investigations, we heard the complaints of the volunteers, "We are asked to do everything, and it is like a free labor force to be a volunteer." We also heard some feedback from the masses, "There are volunteers everywhere, and it doesn't matter if there is a relationship." "This is actually a criticism of the proliferation of volunteer service and the abuse of volunteer resources in some areas. On the one hand, more and more departments and institutions are accustomed to using volunteers as auxiliary forces when promoting their own work. If it involves public service and care and help, volunteers should be mobilized to participate, but if it is only within the scope of administrative work or other work, volunteer resources should not be used casually. On the other hand, some departments and institutions believe that volunteers are an image that requires participation in all large-scale activities and all public activities, resulting in proliferation and abuse. When I participated in a volunteer service exchange meeting in a district of a certain city, the deputy secretary of the district party committee said to the secretary general of the volunteer service federation in front of our experts, "You must know that I signed up as a volunteer by myself, and it is No. XX. Can you please don't just use me for show, for decoration. It turned out that the Volunteer Federation often asked the deputy secretary of the district party committee to participate in the service, either to hold a meeting to present the flag to the volunteer team, or to sweep the streets and shovel "psoriasis" in the Chuangwen Action. He said, "My son often watches TV propaganda and says, 'Dad, what else do you do besides shoveling psoriasis?'" So, I took the initiative to communicate with the deputy secretary of the district party committee and asked him, "Secretary, what is your hobby besides work?" The secretary said that he particularly likes Peking Opera, is a "ticket holder" of Peking Opera, and often sings a few paragraphs. The Secretary-General told me with some embarrassment, "Peking Opera is too elegant to use." "I know that the Volunteer Federation has a "Volunteer Art Troupe", which often goes to employee villages and enterprises in the evenings and weekends to perform for migrant workers. To this end, I suggested that the deputy secretary of the district party committee should participate in the "volunteer art troupe", and participate in performances such as the staff village once or twice a month, and sing for five or six minutes at a time. On the one hand, it allows migrant workers to understand and experience the quintessential art of Peking Opera, and on the other hand, it enhances the exchanges between party and government leaders and enterprise employees. After a year or so, I went to this district again to investigate and study, and the deputy secretary of the district party committee said to me very happily, "Professor Tan, thank you for your suggestion, I now have thirty or forty fans." There are really migrant young people who love Peking Opera. It can be seen that the development of volunteer service is not to do everything, let alone to do everything randomly, and to prevent overflow and abuse. To truly do a good job in volunteer service is to adapt to the needs of society and the masses, give full play to the interests and specialties of volunteers, and carry out rich, diverse, flexible and effective services. To this end, it is necessary to have a scientific and rational design for the development of volunteer service activities, and it is also necessary to adjust and improve it in a timely manner according to the feedback of volunteers and the masses.

In response to the recent discussions and controversies about volunteering in society, we have written an article analyzing the need for "love" and not "tasks" for everyone to exchange and share. Of course, as a professional worker's own opinion, there are also incomplete and inconsiderate places, and volunteers are welcome to criticize and correct.

About the Author

Tan Jianguang (1960-), professor. Honorary President of Guangdong Association for the Promotion of Social Workers and Volunteer Cooperation, Professor of Guangdong Youth League School (Guangdong Youth University of Politics).

END

Source: Sociology

2024 No. 242 | Total No. 471400

Editor: Wu Yangchen