Volunteer empowerment projects promise to transform volunteers while also delivering social services.

Evidence

In Making Volunteers, Nina Eliasoph provides a rich, fascinating interpretation of organizations engaged in ‘‘empowerment projects,’’ that is, attempts to produce personal transformation through volunteering and civic engagement. Such organizations and their ‘‘morally magnetic missions’’ promise to simultaneously deliver social services and provide a transformative civic education for volunteers. Through an ethnographic study of several empowerment projects focused on youth in a Midwestern city (‘‘Snowy Prairie’’), Eliasoph unpacks the tensions between their various goals and the ‘‘organizational style’’ that results, that is, ‘‘patterned ways of harmonizing predictable discords between an organization’s varied missions’’ (p. xii). — Tim Bartley, Review of Making Volunteers, 2

Categorization

• DEFINE: Introduces the key term ‘empowerment projects’ and the concept of an ‘organizational style’ for harmonizing discordant missions.
• corroborated: 6 independent passages support this claim — Tim Bartley, Review of Making Volunteers: Civic Life…, 2
• XREF: connects to: Empowerment projects typically fail to be empowering or effective at service delivery. — Tim Bartley, Review of Making Volunteers: Civic Life…, 3

Related

• Empowerment projects typically fail to be empowering or effective at service delivery. (similarity 0.92)
• Tim Bartley — Review of Making Volunteers Civic Life after Welfare’s End by Nina Eliasoph (similarity 0.84)
• Nina Eliasoph — Making Volunteers Civic Life after Welfare’s End. (similarity 0.83)

Broader Connections

• Empowerment projects typically fail to be empowering or effective at service delivery. #contradicts (0.85) — Tim Bartley, Review of Making Volunteers, 3