This study examines the psychosocial support program implemented after the 2023 Kahramanmaraş earthquakes in Türkiye, focusing on its impact on children and volunteer preservice teachers, and comparing it with the roles of professional educators. Using a qualitative design with thematic analysis, the findings show that the program supported emotional recovery, social connectedness, and resilience among children, while fostering pedagogical skills, emotional resilience, and civic awareness in volunteers. Volunteers contributed through flexible, creative, and relational approaches that not only complemented but also diverged from professional educators by providing unique forms of engagement and impact that professionals could not achieve. The study highlights how volunteering in crisis contexts supports both children's healing and volunteers’ professional and civic development, underscoring the need to empower faculties of education to more actively promote volunteering among preservice teachers.

Although economic incentives are widely used to promote participation in waste bank programs, this study questions whether they may potentially undermine intrinsic motives, such as social, environmental, and educational values. An analysis survey data from 303 Indonesian citizens reveal that economic and non-economic motives—especially social and educational—coexist. In this case, collective efficacy was found to moderate the relationship by transforming the negative effects of non-economic motives on waste bank participation into positive outcomes. However, the impact on economic motives was found to be insignificant. The results of this study imply that fostering collective efficacy may improve non-economic motives and lead to more sustainable community engagement in waste management.

This paper explores the complex dynamics between religion-based solidarity initiatives (RSIs) and local governments, focusing on government funding. RSIs, driven by religious values, support vulnerable groups but often face tension with secular, bureaucratic expectations. Using an institutional logics framework, the study identifies sources of tension and examines how RSIs in Antwerp and Louvain, Belgium, navigate these challenges. Our findings show that by mobilizing faith capital, RSIs strengthen community trust and resilience, enabling strategies such as segmentation or strategic non-engagement to counter government pressures while safeguarding their religious mission. However, state pressures can risk turning RSIs into “blocked organizations”, forcing them to abandon their religious mission. This research sheds light on how RSIs balance accountability to religious communities and government actors, offering insights into their strategies to preserve autonomy.

What are the reasons for which people contribute to humanitarian aid agencies? And what makes them more motivated? In this cross-sectional study, we relied on self-determination and situated expectancy-value theory to examine in an integrated model the degree to which expectancy for success, utility value, and perceived psychological cost predict self-determined motivation and, in turn, job satisfaction and commitment among humanitarian aid workers in Turkey. Path analyses with N = 147 Turkish employees (Mage = 27.49, SD = 9.85 years; 66.7% females) in humanitarian aid agencies showed that job satisfaction related to autonomous motivation, which was predicted by both utility value and expectancy for success. In contrast, controlled motivation failed to associate either with job satisfaction or commitment, while it was predicted positively by utility value and negatively by psychological cost. Amotivation emerged as a negative predictor of commitment and was predicted negatively by expectancy for success and positively by psychological cost. These results highlight the positive role of autonomous motivation, the negative role of cost, and the double function that utility value may serve. Practical implications for these findings are discussed.

Non-profits require highly motivated and professional employees to fulfill their potential to contribute to community development and well-being. But what motivates jobseekers to seek employment in non-profits over governmental organizations, and what makes non-profits more attractive than governmental organizations? Leveraging positive religious and spiritual development and self-determination theories, we theorize that spiritual and religious individuals are more likely to prefer working for non-profits over governmental organizations. This preference occurs because religious and spiritual individuals have stronger traits of self-sacrifice and compassion that motivate them to take a job that offers more non-material incentives than material incentives, leading to a preference for non-profits over governmental organizations. The serial mediation model identifies how compassion and self-sacrifice mediate the effects of spiritual intelligence and religiosity on job motivation; while job motivation mediates the effect of self-sacrifice and compassion on career preference and sector attractiveness. We validate our serial mediation-based conceptual framework based on responses from 306 job seekers in India. The results support our hypotheses, where individuals high on spirituality and religiosity prefer working in non-profits over governmental sector, owing to higher compassion, and self-sacrificing tendencies.

Generative artificial intelligence (GenAI) applications hold transformative potential for non-governmental organizations (NGOs) in addressing social issues. However, the integration of GenAI applications in NGOs is challenging due to the presence of several barriers. Contemporary research has not investigated barriers to GenAI adoption within the context of NGOs. Thus, this study aims to explore and prioritize these barriers to GenAI adoption in NGOs. Our study adopts a three-phase mixed methods research approach. First, GenAI adoption barriers were identified through a comprehensive review of extant literature. Second, a deductive approach was used to finalize the most relevant barriers in context of NGOs. Finally, these barriers were prioritized using a level-based weight assessment method. Results reveal fourteen barriers to GenAI adoption in NGOs. The key barriers include lack of awareness about benefits of GenAI, lack of trust in AI, inadequate training opportunities, limited digital infrastructure, and lack of technical expertise. These barriers reflect sociocultural and ethical challenges that prevent NGOs from realizing benefits of GenAI. Our study is one of the first to provide insights into GenAI adoption barriers among NGOs in India. Prioritization of these barriers provides a systematic approach to overcome them and improve NGOs’ efficiency. Findings highlight the need for a forward-thinking mindset duly supported by a bold and strategic approach to change management in order to promote the GenAI adoption in NGOs. Finally, the study contributes to limited literature on intersection of NGOs and GenAI and provides useful implications for practitioners and policymakers.

This paper contributes to the literature on nonprofit social ventures and discourse studies by identifying discursive resources leveraged to craft the intended image of a nonprofit organization. The intended organizational image plays a central role in the way stakeholders, notably sponsors, perceive a nonprofit organization. Nonetheless, we have little research aimed at identifying the resources and tools that organizations mobilize to structure their intended image, especially at the discourse level. Drawing on the analysis of the discourses adopted by a Brazilian not-for-profit organization, we propose a typology of five discursive resources: distinctiveness, identification, justification, storytelling, and validation. These resources operate as discursive-rhetoric tools that allow the organization to assert its uniqueness and shared values, legitimize its mission, narrate impact, and demonstrate credibility. Our findings contribute to a discourse-based understanding of nonprofit image construction by offering a framework that complements existing work in branding and legitimacy. The study also provides practical insights for nonprofit managers seeking to communicate authentically and efficiently with key stakeholders.

This article compares the knowledge produced by the academic and practical communities regarding the collective impact (CI) approach to social innovation, exploring its implications for the fields of social innovation and nonprofit organizations. We conducted a literature review of articles published in journals focused on practitioners and academic journals, covering the approach's first ten years (2011–2021). The findings highlight seven key themes of comparison. They concern different understandings of CI, various fields of application, equity in the CI approach, CI application in advocacy initiatives, criticisms of the CI approach, real-world applications and methodological approaches, and the importance of community integration and a bottom-up approach in CI. The article's contributions revolve around building a bridge between the knowledge produced by each community and providing a critical analysis of key themes addressed by them, including equity, cross-sector collaboration, and advocacy, while connecting empirical findings to both theoretical and practical implications for NPOs.

With widespread social media adoption, online charitable platforms have expanded significantly. These platforms typically emphasize recipients’ hardships and transformations to encourage donations, but the effectiveness of these messaging strategies remains unclear. Drawing on narrative persuasion and social exchange theories, this research examines the impact of aligning the valence of recipients’ attitudes toward their plight with contrast effects on public participation intentions through three experiments. The results reveal that: (1) When narrative messages portray the recipient's positive attitude toward their plight, those with a contrast effect significantly increase intentions to donate and disseminate; in contrast, when the narrative messages depict the recipient's negative attitude toward their plight, those without a contrast effect significantly enhance donation intention; (2) perceived social image and perceived efficacy serve as mediating factors; and (3) self-other overlap moderates these relationships, with significant effects evident only when self-other overlap is high. This research reveals how recipient roles and narrative strategies shape public participation in online charitable projects, providing actionable insights for organizations to craft more effective fundraising messages.

Studies in volunteering often focus on why people start volunteering and how to retain volunteers. Conversely, less attention is given to why volunteers quit. Hustinx (Nonprofit Volunt Sect Q 39(2):236–255, 2010) provided a substantial contribution on this topic by examining quitting volunteering at the Flemish Red Cross. The present article revisits and extends the contribution of Hustinx (2010), by exploring reasons to quit volunteering at the Netherlands’ largest refugee aid organization. Based on thematic analysis of open answers from 605 former volunteers for refugees, we find that organization-related reasons and personal circumstances are important drivers for quitting volunteering, thereby confirming Hustinx’ outcomes. Moreover, we identified another ‘umbrella’ under which many exit reasons can be subsumed: reasons to quit volunteering that are rooted in egocentric considerations. Next to this third perspective, this study raises attention for burnout and boreout in volunteering and challenges in mentor–mentee relationships, being volunteer–refugee relationships where volunteers quit out of frustration, disappointment or unfulfilled expectations. Implications of the findings and directions for further research are discussed.

This article introduces the concept of valorization to theorize how voluntary social welfare organizations foster social inclusion for marginalized individuals. Departing from dominant frameworks that view volunteering primarily as a pathway to labor market integration, the study conceptualizes inclusion as a dialectical process of valorization—co-constructed through sustained interaction between volunteers and enabling organizational settings. Based on qualitative interviews with 13 marginalized volunteers and three organizational leaders in Danish voluntary social welfare organizations, the analysis identifies three interrelated phases of the valorization process: (1) the discovery of informal, biographically rooted competencies, (2) the reinforcement of self-efficacy through organizational validation, and (3) the internalization of new narratives of self-worth. Rather than facilitating capital accumulation, these organizations enable recognition of informal resources often overlooked in formal institutions.

The democratic character of Norwegian voluntary organizations is facing tension from rising social inequality and increased demands for specialized expertise. This article explores this tension by examining how social class and individual resources influence board volunteering. We argue that an occupation-based class analysis better captures socioeconomic differences in board volunteering than a resource-theory model by considering both the volume and composition of resources. Using a survey from Norway, we use occupational data to operationalize a scheme that allows us to distinguish class positions according to employment relations and skill requirements. We also control for economic, social, and cultural resources. We find that those in higher-level class positions linked to managerial and socio-cultural occupations, but not technical occupations, are more likely to volunteer on boards. Furthermore, class differences are only partly explained by individual resources, demonstrating that class analysis can complement existing approaches in volunteer research.

This article examines how donor requirements affect Civil Society Organisations’ execution of foreign aid initiatives, comparing core and project funding mechanisms in development cooperation. Through a structured, focused comparison of two Latin American CSOs receiving funding from the Swedish International Development Cooperation Agency (SIDA), the research reveals that core funding, contrary to prevailing theories, has a more detrimental impact than project funding due to the nature, timing, and cost of its associated requirements. The analysis identifies variations in stakeholder impact across the aid chain, with intermediary organisations playing significant roles. The findings challenge assumptions about core funding's empowering effects, highlighting how multiple layers of requirements can impede operational effectiveness. The study contributes to scholarly understanding of donor-recipient dynamics while offering practical insights for improving aid delivery mechanisms. It suggests that enhancing aid effectiveness requires not merely simplified requirements, but a fundamental reconsideration of how donors structure their relationships with implementing CSOs.

This paper examines patterns of volunteering during COVID-19 in different areas of civil society and demographic groups in Denmark. The aim is to understand how differences in the areas of civil society's political resources and organizational settings, and different barriers to volunteering of demographic groups, relate to variation in the levels of volunteering in periods of the pandemic with different lockdown measures. Using two cross-sectional surveys from spring 2020 (n = 3,497), and spring 2021 (n = 1,692), and a four-round panel dataset (n = 1,340), we measure changes in volunteer participation during the first year of the pandemic. We find significant drops in volunteering within most areas. While the level of lockdown correlates strongly with changes in volunteering, differences between areas of civil society point to the importance of variations in political resources and organizational settings for explaining which areas recovered fastest in the re-opening of society. Additionally, declines in volunteering did not differ significantly across demographic groups.

This commentary on Hung, Lu, and Hung's (2025) meta-analysis of donor reaction to the “Price” of giving outlines links between research on “Price,” the charitable deduction and “overhead aversion.” I also suggest how approaching the subject from an accounting perspective can suggest additional moderating factors.