In the UK, food banks and other forms of food aid have become a normalised support mechanism for those living at the sharp end of poverty. Drawing from accounts of those who have used, worked, and volunteered in two of England’s food banks during the Covid-19 pandemic, this article explores some of the key challenges that emerged for food aid during this unique period. In documenting these experiences, the paper concurs with previous work that has identified the expanding role of food banks in providing core welfare support, suggesting an increasingly extended welfare function of food aid. This has implications for understanding the effectiveness of welfare – and the appropriateness of our reliance on voluntary aid – in the post-pandemic period.

In the state of Queensland, volunteers perform much of the work needed to prevent the extinction of threatened species who are native and unique to this continent. Acting from an understanding of interspecies justice, caring people rescue and rehabilitate hundreds of thousands of wild animals every year. Many of these same people conduct informal environmental education to bring to community attention the problematics of extinction by seeking the material expression of an ethics of conviviality. Using a document case study approach, this paper narrates aspects of the kindship work of a network of carers and educators of flying foxes who undertake informal environmental education as part of their care practices. Volunteering to care and educate for Australian flying mammals is a form of activism in a nation with a mammalian extinction crisis that still fails to meet its obligations under the United Nations Sustainable Development Goal 15. This paper describes how volunteer run informal environmental education in far north Queensland is driven by a strong sense of multispecies care.

Over the past 40 years, positive ageing discourses that speak to an expectation of continued productivity have gained prominence within research and policy. Such discourses have been critiqued as placing disproportionate value on the extension of older adults' working lives, while obscuring other valuable forms of work performed by older adults. Despite the emergence of theoretical conversations about the expansion of conceptions of work, few studies have adopted an explicit focus on the work performed by older adults within their neighbourhoods. Informed by conceptions of work positioned at the intersection of critical gerontology and critical feminism, we drew upon qualitative data from a larger ethnographic study, generated from 17 participants aged 65 and older, to examine: (a) the various forms and contributions of unpaid work that older adults carry out at the neighbourhood level, and (b) the ways in which older adults' representations of this work relate to dominant notions of productivity. Specifically, each participant engaged in three types of qualitative interviews, including additional spatial and visual data generation: (a) completing a narrative interview; (b) carrying a small Global Positioning System (GPS) device to automatically log locations, completing an activity diary and a follow-up interview; and (c) participating in a go-along interview or a photo elicitation interview. Our findings highlight a range of unpaid work performed by participants in their neighbourhood, including formal volunteering, informal caring and informal civic participation. Although these forms of work were, at times, discussed by participants as enabling social inclusion, significant tensions arose from the general lack of discursive and social value assigned to them. In particular, participants described being subject to overwhelming expectations placed on older adults, and women in particular, to carry out this work, with little recognition or acknowledgement of their contributions to the neighbourhood. Taken together, our findings suggest the need not only to diversify understandings of the forms of work perceived as aligning with productive contributions to society in older age, but also to attend to the invisible work performed by older adults within their neighbourhoods. Additionally, we propose a variety of ways organisations and communities that benefit from older adults' unpaid labour may enhance accessibility, thereby reducing the work done by older adults to negotiate tensions between ableist expectations for productivity and their ageing bodies.

During large-scale crises such as the COVID-19 pandemic, the precarity of older people and older volunteers can become exacerbated, especially in under-serviced rural regions and small towns. To understand how the pandemic has affected “older voluntarism”, this article presents a case study of three volunteer-based programs in rural Ontario, Canada. Interviews with 34 volunteers and administrators reveal both challenging and growth-oriented experiences of volunteers and the programs during the first wave of COVID-19. The findings demonstrate the vulnerability and resiliency of older volunteers and the adaptability and uncertainty of programs that rely on older voluntarism, as the community and its older residents navigate pandemic-related changes. The article advances a framework for understanding the pandemic’s impacts on older voluntarism in relation to personal, program, and community dimensions of sustainable rural aging. Further, it explores ways that older volunteers, organizations that depend on them, and communities experiencing population aging can persevere post-pandemic.

Across numerous countries with advanced welfare states, governments have relied on a hybrid of publicly funded and delivered welfare services and voluntary charity to meet the needs of people in poverty. Driven by austerity and economic downturns, many scholars agree that governments are increasingly relying on charity as a response to poverty. Taking Australia as a case study, this article demonstrates how the decayed welfare state is not just about outsourcing welfare provision to charities, but also a part of a broader project to cultivate a society in which social problems are responded to through spontaneous, community-led initiatives, powered by the ethical commitment of everyday citizens. We show how this project produces poverty through welfare state retrenchment, whilst simultaneously cultivating charity through material and symbolic support from the state. This results in the construction of charity as an end in itself, with little consideration given to its effectiveness in alleviating poverty.

Research has shown that long-term care (LTC) volunteers play important roles in enhancing the quality of life (QoL) of older LTC residents, often through providing unique forms of relational care. Guided by Kane’s QoL domains, we used a modified objective hermeneutics method to analyze how unique volunteer roles are represented and supported in provincial policies in Alberta, British Columbia, Ontario, and Nova Scotia. We found that policies define volunteer roles narrowly, which may limit residents’ QoL. This happens through (1) omitting volunteers from most regulatory policy, (2) likening volunteers to supplementary staff rather than to caregivers with unique roles, and (3) overemphasizing residents’ safety, security, and order. We offer insights into promising provincial policy directions for LTC volunteers, yet we argue that further regulating volunteers may be an inadequate or ill-suited approach to addressing the cultural, social, and structural changes required for volunteers to enhance LTC residents’ QoL effectively.

Montessori-based interventions (MBIs) were developed to promote guided participation in meaningful activities by people with dementia patients. In this study, we assessed nursing home volunteers’ fidelity to an MBI, relying primarily on a qualitative descriptive design. We completed a deductive content analysis of eight volunteer interviews using the Conceptual Framework for Intervention Fidelity. We also calculated average volunteer and resident scores on the Visiting Quality Questionnaire (VQQ), which assesses volunteers’ and residents’ perceptions of visits. We found good evidence that volunteers attended scheduled visits, made use of pre-designed activities, and attended to training recommendations. Most reported enjoying the visits (VQQ $ \overline{x} $ = 6.12, standard deviation [SD] = 0.75) and receiving a positive response from residents (VQQ $ \overline{x} $ = 5.46, SD = 0.88). Nevertheless, use of pre-designed activities and response to the MBI was lower for volunteers working with residents who had late-stage dementia. Therefore, overall, fidelity depended on the cognitive status of the resident.

Introduction: The Maximizing Aging Using Volunteer Engagement in the ED (MAUVE + ED) program connects specially trained volunteers with older patients whose personal and social needs are not always met within the busy ED environment. The objective of this study was to describe the development and implementation of the MAUVE + ED program and the activities performed with older patients by its volunteers. Methods: The MAUVE + ED program was implemented in the ED (annual census 65,000) of a large academic tertiary hospital in Toronto, Ontario. Volunteers were trained to identify and approach older patients and others at greater risk for adverse outcomes, including poor patient experience, in the ED and invite such patients to participate in the program. The program is available to all patients >65 years, and those with confusion, patients who were alone, those with mobility issues, and patients with increased length of stay in the ED. Volunteers documented their activities after each patient encounter using a standardized paper-based data collection form. Results: Over the program's initial 6-month period, the MAUVE + ED volunteers reported a total of 896 encounters with 718 unique patients. The median (IQR) time a MAUVE volunteer spent with a patient was 10 (5, 20) minutes, with a range of 1 to 130 minutes. The median (IQR) number of patients seen per shift was 7 (6, 9), with a range of 1 to 16 patients per shift. The most common activities the volunteer assisted with were therapeutic activities/social visits (n = 859; 95.9%), orientation activities (n = 501; 55.9%), and hydration assistance (n = 231; 25.8%). The least common were mobility assistance (n = 36; 4.0%), and vision/hearing assistance (n = 13; 1.5%). Conclusion: Preliminary data suggest the MAUVE + ED volunteers were able to enrich the experience of older adults and their families/carers in the ED.