Tag: civil society

What can we learn about and from dropouts? 

Photo by William Fortunato on Pexels.com

Andreas Kewes

German Sport University Cologne, Germany

This blog post is a travelogue. It describes my journey into the world of volunteering, which culminated in my research article “Dropouts in Volunteering and the Role of the Multidimensional Experiential Space.” The journey began in the early 2010s. At that time, my colleague Chantal Munsch from the University of Siegen, Germany, and I wanted to find out why people drop out of volunteering for charitable organizations. We were familiar with research on lack of resources, i.e., the research insight that volunteers give up their involvement due to lack of time, for example. However, this result seemed too individualized to us. We wanted to know whether social situations and group conflicts played a greater role in these withdrawals than had previously been assumed. That is why we focused our sample on welfare organizations: in Germany, they clearly originate from milieus such as Catholicism, Protestantism, or the working class, for example. At the time, we thought we could show that such milieus of engagement still exist, that they shaped the organizations, and that new volunteers were bothered by this. To further emphasize this perspective in our sampling, we interviewed former volunteers with their own migration histories, because we thought they would certainly be outside the milieu ties. 

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Organizing Civility: Bridging Practices in Islamic Welfare Organization

Photo from Dr. Kalia’s field work

Sumrin Kalia1 and Gregory Jackson2

1Freie Universität Berlin, Germany, 2King’s College London, UK

Often when we think of non-profits, we tend to focus on efficiency, organizational image, or fundraising. However, these organizations also play an important social role, leaving lasting impacts on the relationships, values, and social boundaries that shape civic life. They can promote inclusion, justice, and enable dialogue across social boundaries, but the opposite may also be true.

What can civil society organizations do to enable a coexistence that values justice over exploitation, cooperation over conflict, and inclusion over exclusion?

This question anchors our recently published article, “Organizing Civility: The Ethics of Adab in an Islamic Welfare Organization”. We look at the case of ‘Saylani Welfare Trust’ an Islamic welfare organization that engages in what we call ‘practices of civility’. Saylani draws inspiration from Sufism a mystical tradition of Islam that emerged in the eighth century.

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