Does volunteering impact refugee women's life satisfaction, empowerment, and wellbeing?
Authors: Catherine Panter-Brick, Jannik J. Eggerman, Philip Jefferies, Lina Qtaishat, Rana Dajani, Praveen Kumar
Citation:
There are gaps in the evidence base addressing whether volunteering programs enhance the wellbeing, empowerment, and life satisfaction of individual volunteers. Program impacts are seldom rigorously evaluated, whilst construct meanings remain largely unspecified, especially in the Middle East. This study tested the impacts of We Love Reading, a program training volunteers to read aloud in their local communities. It also mapped local knowledge representation. This program evaluation integrates scientifically rigorous and culturally relevant methodologies to identify impacts, local knowledge systems, and causal pathways of influence. This helps clarify how and why volunteering works in real-life situations across cultural contexts, calling attention to what programs seek to achieve, how they avoid volunteer burden, and why they generate social change.