Volunteering Experience of St. Petersburg's Youth: Social Meaning and Strategies to Use in Building a Career

This research focuses on the event-based volunteering of young people in Saint Petersburg. In contrast to charitable areas of volunteering, where people work for free, based on altruistic impulses, volunteering at events, first, is most similar to ordinary labor relations; secondly, it is often encouraged in some way; and, third, it has a lot of risks. Previous research has shown that volunteers do not have the ability to openly discuss community issues, becoming trapped in the fact that the activity is completely voluntary. In turn, the new stage of the research is devoted to the analysis of the experience of those participants of the volunteer movement who occupy high positions in the hierarchy. The question for study is how the experience of event-based volunteering is integrated into the labor biography of the youth of St. Petersburg. The research objectives are: 1) to study the importance of volunteerism given by community representatives; 2) to study the motivation for volunteerism; 3) to study the working conditions that the organization provides to volunteers; 4) to study what advantages and capitals volunteering develops for young people, which are in demand for their future career; 5) to study what restrictions, barriers and negative effects volunteering has for their future career. As part of the study, 18 in-depth semi-structured interviews with volunteers were collected. The analysis of these interviews revealed various scenarios for integrating volunteerism into the labour biography of young people, as well as a comprehensive description of the volunteer community and the nature of volunteer work.