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Welfare Clients' Volunteering as a Means of Empowerment

Tel Hai Academic College, tomerlil{at}bezeqint.net

The population approaching social services for help is often characterized by poverty, passivity, helplessness, and an external locus of control. This population expects improvement in its situation but develops a dependent relationship with the help agents. The literature shows that volunteer work contributes toward developing empowerment among volunteers, but to date only a relatively small number of welfare clients have been activated as volunteers, serving more as the object of others' volunteer work. This article describes a classic experimental study, checking the connection between welfare clients' volunteering and their individual feeling of empowerment. The main and most significant finding in the study demonstrated that individual feeling of empowerment among clients who engaged in volunteer work was higher than that of clients not engaged in such work. The findings suggest that volunteer work may serve as an effective intervention tool in social work, whose aim is change in welfare clients' feelings of empowerment.

Key Words: empowerment • volunteering • welfare clients

This version was published on June 1, 2009

Nonprofit and Voluntary Sector Quarterly, Vol. 38, No. 3, 522-534 (2009)
DOI: 10.1177/0899764008320196


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