Volunteerism in the Midst of the Pandemic

The COVID-19 pandemic has hurt numerous institutional arrangements the modern world established including domestic and international trade, tourism and transportation, education, jobs and works, political campaigns, sports, and the ways people communicate with one another. In essence, the pandemic reduced the scope and depth of social interactions significantly. No doubt that social interactions were a fundamental means that helped creat and maintain the aforementioned arrangements and others. An area heavily impacted by the pandemic is volunteerism field that usually took face-to-face social interactions as a dominant mode for most activities. This session seeks to study the pandemic’s impact on volunteerism across countries. It is obviously expected that volunteers and their activities have declined due to the pandemic mainly because it suppressed the extent of social interactions. However, are there any international variations in the degree of such reduction? Further, have there been any alternative approaches to volunteerism developed to make up for the lack of social interactions between volunteers and the recipients of their services? If so, are they effective enough to replace traditional face-to-face volunteerism even after the current COVID-19 crisis? Or are they only a temporary alternative to get through the pandemic period? Are there any cross-national variations of the employment rates and patterns of the alternative means of volunteerism?