Fragility and anti-fragility of Italian volunteering in the polycritical context

Abstract

Volunteering is a multifaceted phenomenon of great relevance to the social sciences. Several studies confirm how it significantly contributes to mitigating and partially alleviating the effects of crises (Guo et al., 2021; Della Porta, 2020) and, more generally, the distorting effects of capitalism and the market (Rago & Venturi, 2020). Despite the fact that crises increase the range of social needs to which institutional welfare alone cannot respond, it is noted that Italian volunteering has changed during the Covid pandemic, experiencing a crisis due to a reduced capacity to involve and activate individuals willing to engage in activities of general interest (Eurispes, 2022).

In 2021, there were about 360,000 non-profit institutions (NPIs) active in Italy and about 261,000 with volunteers (76.1% of the total NPIs). The aim of this paper is to describe the different forms of “organised volunteering” and to analyse specific contexts in order to identify the factors that, at territorial level, could influence the traditional way of volunteering and allow new forms of engagement and civic participation to emerge.

Specifically, we analyse the data collected by the permanent censuses of non-profit institutions  in order to classify NPIs according to structural characteristics, human resources, activities carried out, and other qualitative information such as scope (mutual versus public benefit), target of mission (individuals versus community), network of stakeholders, and category of vulnerability addressed. This analysis makes it possible to identify different types of volunteering and their changes over time, providing the empirical basis for new reflections on the fragility (or not) of organised volunteering in Italy.