In the face of overlapping crises—from war to climate change—European societies are witnessing shifting patterns of civic engagement, with volunteering emerging as a key yet uneven form of solidarity. The seminar explores the variability of volunteering through new comparative data from the Czech Republic and Italy. By addressing questions of who volunteers, where and how, the seminar contributes to a renewed research agenda on volunteering in turbulent times.
Key speakers:
Tereza Pospíšilová, Faculty of Humanities, Charles University, Czech Republic
Riccardo Guidi, University of Firenze, Italy
Tania Cappadozzi, Istat – Italian Institute of Statistics, Italy
Gabriela Strašilová, Czech Statistical Institute, Czech Republic
The full program, including details on discussants and logistics, will be available by mid-October. To receive
it, please register via this link.
European societies are currently navigating turbulent times, marked by the convergence of multiple, overlapping crises—including war, climate change, economic instability, and democratic erosion. In this context, citizens and civil societies are responding in diverse ways, with volunteering emerging as one of the key forms of solidarity and civic engagement. Volunteering has been declining since the 1990s and at the same time changing its patterns. The aim of this seminar is to share new findings and discuss the different forms of volunteering and thereby to contribute to the new research agenda focusing on the variability of volunteering and its implications in times of change.
This seminar adopts an international perspective. The first part focusess on Czech – Italian comparison utilizing national datasets on volunteering and voluntary activities. These datasets, recently produced by the statistical institutes of the Czech Republic, are based on the International Labour Organization’s methodology for measuring volunteer work.
The second part of the seminar broadens the scope through international reflections, with contributions from Slovakia and Norway, and opens space for complementary perspectives and a discussion.
We want to address three central questions:
(1) Who engages in volunteering? When we focus on the 'core'
group of the most intensively involved volunteers, in what ways do they differ from the broader volunteer
population?
(2) How are the patterns of volunteering shaped by the characteristics of the communities in
which they occur? In particular, what is the difference between rural and urban settings?
(3) What trajectories might volunteering follow in the near future? In this study, we use
intergenerational differences as a proxy for identifying potential shifts in volunteering patterns over time.