Volunteering is generally considered an altruistic activity where an individual or group provides services for no financial gain. Volunteering is also renowned for skill development, and is often intended to promote goodness or to improve human quality of life. Volunteering may have positive benefits for the volunteer as well as for the person or community served. It is also intended to make contacts for possible employment. Many volunteers are specifically trained in the areas they work, such as medicine, education, or emergency rescue. Others serve on an as-needed basis, such as in response to a natural disaster.
The verb was first recorded in 1755. It was derived from the noun volunteer, in C.1600, “one who offers himself for military service,” from the Middle French voluntaire. In the non-military sense, the word was first recorded during the 1630s. The word volunteering has more recent usage—still predominantly military—coinciding with the phrase community service. In a military context, a volunteer army is a military body whose soldiers chose to enter service, as opposed to having been conscripted. Such volunteers do not work “for free” and are given regular pay.
Volunteering as utilized by service learning programs
Many schools on all education levels offer service-learning, which allow the student to serve a group through volunteering while earning educational credit. According to Alexander Astin in the forward to Where’s the Learning in ServiceLearning? by Janet Eyler and Dwight E. Giles, Jr.,”…we promote more wide-spread adoption of service-learning in higher education because we see it as a powerful means of preparing students to become more caring and responsible parents and citizens and of helping colleges and universities to make good on their pledge to ‘serve society.'”
When describing service learning, the Medical Education at Harvard says, “Service learning unites academic study and volunteer community service in mutually reinforcing ways. …service learning is characterized by a relationship of partnership: the student learns from the service agency and from the community and, in return,gives energy, intelligence, commitment, time and skills to address human and community needs.”[5] Volunteering in service learning seems to have the result of engaging both mind and heart, thus providing a more powerful learning experience; according to Janet Eyler and Dwight E. Giles,it succeeds by the fact that it “…fosters student development by capturing student interest…”
