Empowerment projects typically fail to be empowering or effective at service delivery.

Evidence

These tensions are substantial, and they mostly keep empowerment projects from being either empowering or especially good at delivering social services. For instance, although empowerment projects speak of intense, transformative experiences, they undermine the conditions for these by chasing funding through short-term projects, avoiding conflict, and relying on shortterm volunteers. Furthermore, their commitments to open-ended planning and to the intrinsic value of volunteer work often keep them from providing effective services for their youth participants. Though empowerment projects celebrate diversity and put disadvantaged and non-disadvantaged kids together to work on projects, they fail to generate real integration, deep discussion of inequality, or meaningful discoveries about the ‘‘other.’’ Instead, the organizational style of empowerment projects emphasizes surface-level similarities, avoids politics, and values innovation and future potential over continuity. As Eliasoph puts it, ‘‘Empowerment Projects offer many chances to feel ambivalence and doubt—about one’s culture, one’s intimate relationships, one’s inspiring volunteer spirit—but almost no chance to express, discuss, and possibly untangle the ambivalence and doubt’’ (p. 234). — Tim Bartley, Review of Making Volunteers, 3

Categorization

• XREF: Parallels critiques of the nonprofit/volunteer sector’s depoliticizing effects, echoing work on the ‘nonprofit industrial complex’ and critiques of civic engagement rhetoric. — connects to: Volunteer empowerment projects promise to transform volunteers while also delivering social services. — Tim Bartley, Review of Making Volunteers: Civic Life…, 2
• SEED: An essay angle: the structural reasons well-meaning empowerment programs produce ambivalence without resolution, and what this implies for designing genuinely transformative civic education.
• corroborated: 5 independent passages support this claim — Tim Bartley, Review of Making Volunteers: Civic Life…, 3

Related

• Volunteer empowerment projects promise to transform volunteers while also delivering social services. (similarity 0.92)
• Tim Bartley — Review of Making Volunteers Civic Life after Welfare’s End by Nina Eliasoph (similarity 0.82)
• Nina Eliasoph — Making Volunteers Civic Life after Welfare’s End. (similarity 0.82)