This article is disappointing: it gives a very strong impression that you wrote the bottom line first. As a result, this looks not so much as an article about "How valuable is volunteering?", but rather a collection of arguments designed to steer a reader from volunteering towards effective altruism.
Since that is essentially what you're doing, you should be more open about that, and then the article would be more effective as well. The way it looks now, I imagine reading it as a high school student and immediately thinking: "this guy isn't really interested in finding out the value of volunteering. He has his own agenda to sell."
The logical structure of the article makes it clear that you're eliminating options one by one:
Want to volunteer? It's costly for the nonprofit to train you, don't be so selfish.
Bummer, what should I do then? Glad you asked! There's this thing called effective altruism...
You never try to see why volunteering may be more valuable than donating. There's no attempt to understand, much less steelman, the opposing side. Here, off the top of my head:
When volunteering, a person sees the fruits of their labor immediately; when donating money, there's uncertainty about whether it really goes to the stated goal, or is squandered due to incompetence, inefficiency, fraud. Organizations that track and rank charities solve this only partially, since you need to trust them, too, and their ability to understand the charities may be limited. Depending on how people estimate the degree of uncertainty, they may rationally prefer volunteering.
Volunteering may be a way to train oneself effectively to help others, by using social pleasure and cohesiveness. Some people are just not motivated enough by sending a check and imagining the rest; you can tell them to "separate utilons and hedons" all you want, but if the actual result is that they'll stop donating, it may be better to volunteer.
Visible volunteering work is much more effective at drawing others to charitable causes than hired workforce performing the same work.
Finally, your particular arguments are sometimes poor, as is typical for arguments chosen for a precommitted bottom line. For example:
But after a certain point, people aren't willing to give more money to charity. By getting people to give to one nonprofit, you can make them reluctant to give to other nonprofits, reducing their funding.
An unconvincing zero-sum assumption (who said we're anywhere near close the "certain point"?). Also, hello, by urging people to consider e.g. GiveWell's recommendations, this is exactly what you're doing!
training and supervising volunteers often costs a nonprofit a lot of money,
If it's not net helpful to the nonprofit, they will not accept the volunteers.
Thanks for the thoughtful comment. As with all articles that I've posted from Cognito Mentoring, part of my purpose in posting is to solicit feedback, both on the content and on the presentation.
This article is disappointing: it gives a very strong impression that you wrote the bottom line first.
The article was written with an assumption that the reader would have been exposed to the basic arguments in favor of volunteering ahead of time, which accounts for the imbalance.
...Since that is essentially what you're doing, you should be more open about tha
This essay was written for high school and college students who are considering volunteering. I'm interested in finding high social value activities for high school and college students to engage in, and would be grateful for any suggestions.
High school and college students are often just starting to think about how to make a difference and improve the world. One salient option available to them is volunteering. How valuable is volunteering?
One way in which volunteering can be valuable is that it can be enjoyable. This is the primary motivation of some volunteers. Another way in which volunteering can be valuable is that it can build skills. Building skills is valuable to the extent that you need them later on. As an example, working on an open source software project is often cited as a good way of developing programming skills.
What of the direct social value of volunteering to others? There are many factors that cut against volunteering having social value to others in general:
Factors that cut against volunteering having social value
Volunteering to help people who can afford to pay generally doesn't help them much, or simply saves them money
In general, people are willing to pay for work that they find useful. If you're doing volunteer work to help people who have the capacity to pay, you're often either:
Saving people money when they can afford to pay is not an effective way of helping people.
Volunteering to help people who would be willing to pay can reduce the job prospects of those who would be paid
The article before you pay to volunteer abroad, think of the harm you might do reports on Americans doing volunteer projects in Cambodia. The projects are ones that locals would have otherwise been willing to pay poor Cambodians to do. Because the Americans were willing to do them for free, the poor Cambodians weren't hired.
Volunteer activities targeted at those in need are often less helpful than giving cash
People generally know what they need best better than outsiders do, and this points in the direction of giving them money to purchase the services and goods that they need most rather than providing services that they may or may not benefit from.
There are exceptions to this – for example, it may be more efficient to have a soup kitchen for homeless people than to give them money to buy food, because one can serve many homeless people simultaneously, cutting down on the costs of facilities and preparation. But unless you have reason to believe that
you should adopt the presumption that giving cash is better than engaging in volunteer activities to help the beneficiaries.
Relatedly, GiveWell ranks GiveDirectly (which transfers cash to poor Kenyan families) as one of its three top charities, above a multitude of organizations that implement other activities in the developing world.
Even when volunteer activities help the beneficiaries, they can hurt others
Consider the case of fundraising for a nonprofit. The activity helps the nonprofit. But what effect does the activity have on other nonprofits? Fundraising might make donors give more in general. But after a certain point, people aren't willing to give more money to charity. By getting people to give to one nonprofit, you can make them reluctant to give to other nonprofits, reducing their funding.
Consider the case of volunteer tutoring. A lot of what people learn in school is material that they don't need to know later on in life, so that the primary way in which learning helps is to get them better grades, which helps them get into more prestigious colleges. But there are only a limited number of slots at a prestigious college. So tutoring can have the effect of knocking people out of the running when they don't have access to quality educational resources.
Volunteering can be costly to nonprofits
According to the report the cost of a volunteer, training and supervising volunteers often costs a nonprofit a lot of money, reducing the resources that it has to use for its activities.
Volunteering is often worse than donating
In Donate Money, Not Time or Stuff Jeff Kaufman points out that to the extent that nonprofits need people to do the work that volunteers do, in cases where the nonprofit could hire someone just as good (or better) than you are for the work for a wage below your earning power, it's generally better to donate $X than it is to volunteer $X worth of your time.
What to do?
Learn about economics and effective philanthropy
In view of the above considerations, finding volunteer activities with high social value can be very tricky. To figure out which ones they are, it helps to
If you do these things sooner rather than later, you'll be much better positioned to make the most out of your volunteer time. I'd be happy to correspond with high school or college students who are interested in the subjects above.
Consider creating online content that many people can benefit from
One promising area for contributing social value through volunteer work is creating online content. This is because (i) the number of people who can benefit is large (ii) people are seldom willing to pay for online content even when they benefit from it.
By engaging in activities like writing Wikipedia articles on important subjects, you can hope to have a large social impact relative to the impact that a high school student would usually have.
This is only one promising activity, and it won't be right for everyone: we're in the process of searching for other promising candidates, and welcome any suggestions.
Build skills to help people later
Learning skills like programming, and writing can situate you better to help people in the future. This is true of high school students in particular, who have the potential to become much more knowledgeable and skilled. The resulting humanitarian benefits can be much larger than the benefits of volunteering now.
Cross-posted from the Cognito Mentoring blog.