Volunteers in Name Only: Implications of Court‐Mandated Service on Volunteer Management

ABSTRACT

For nonprofits facing a shifting volunteer base and pressure to engage volunteers in new ways, mandatory service presents both opportunities and challenges for volunteer management that are similar yet distinct from episodic volunteers. In this manuscript, we use semi‐structured interview data from a sample of 26 nonprofit organizations to explore why and how nonprofits use court‐mandated volunteers (CMs). We find that nonprofits base their decisions on whether and how to use CMs on instrumental, expressive, and affiliative considerations. Our findings suggest that nonprofits who use CMs perceive that engaging with CMs aligns with their mission, can accommodate many volunteer hours in a short amount of time, and possess the capacity to effectively manage CMs. However, when nonprofits choose to use CMs, especially those with full‐time volunteer managers, they utilize them differently than traditional volunteers, tending to put them in sweat roles segregated from other volunteers and service beneficiaries. This differential use of CMs raises important concerns about whether this sort of mandated service can achieve its purpose of connecting CMs to their communities to curb recidivism. Further, it challenges the very notion of what it means to be a volunteer from both the coercive nature of the relationship and how this labor is used, leading us to consider individuals engaging in mandated service as volunteers in name only.