Dr Megan Paull

Previous research on Volunteering in aged care settings in Western Australia: Good practice during covid-19 and beyond (Paull & Paulin 2022) and The Jacaranda Project (Paull & Paulin 2020) highlighted several issues which merited further investigation. In addition, the Royal Commission on Aged Care Quality and Safety (CoA, 2021) made many recommendations to improve aged care provision in Australia including recognition of the importance of the contribution of volunteers in addressing social isolation and assistance with client activities in age care settings.

This report outlines a project involving a series of interviews and research workshops (held in person and online) over several months in 2023 and 2024 by the Project Team from Murdoch University. The project was designed to develop an understanding of the role of those who managed or coordinated volunteer activity in residential dementia care settings in Western Australia.

The outcomes of this research are set out in the following report.

Key findings in relation to managing volunteering in dementia care settings in Western Australia in 2023/24 are as follows:

Communications: Language used is important. In the interests of clarity for this report, we refer to volunteers/visitors, residents/clients and volunteer managers.

Complexity: There are several levels of cognitive impairment/dementia which require different levels of approach in managing volunteers in aged care settings.

Compliance: Government policy now requires aged care providers to have a volunteer program and for those volunteers to be well trained.

Organisational Policies: Ongoing recognition and support for volunteer managers and volunteer programs is vital.

Managing at a distance: Volunteer managers often manage at a distance from the site where volunteering takes place, adding a layer of complexity for both volunteers and managers.

First Language: Learning how to communicate with first language speakers is important and resources to assist such as advice on talking to someone with dementia which may be useful for volunteer involving organisations to offer to their volunteers in dementia care settings.

Training: For both volunteer managers and volunteers. The nature and volume of training is a delicate balance, not only to identify how much is enough, but also to meet compliance and motivational needs.

Recruiting and retaining volunteers, especially a diverse representation of volunteers, is an ongoing and problematic task for P&C committee members.

The challenge of finding volunteers and increasing the diversity of volunteers is not unique to the P&C setting nor to Australia.

Volunteering—as we know it—is in decline, with COVID-19 causing further disruption to volunteering initiatives and community building in general. Volunteering, and the decline in volunteering, are well researched but not in a P&C context, which has some unique features compared to other nonprofit and volunteer-led organisations. The most obvious disadvantage is that parents tend to move on from the P&C when their children leave the school, so length of service is limited, but a large advantage is that parents are highly motivated to be involved in their children’s lives.

We were retained by WACSSO to research the perennial question of how to maintain a diverse team of volunteers to organise, support, and engage in P&C initiatives. We have drawn on collective experience and knowledge to identify a practical and versatile framework for building a base of volunteers. We identified areas where knowledge can be shared, as well as where expertise is more sparsely distributed and knowledge-building is warranted.

Analysis of data from 238 surveys and 14 in-depth interviews using mixed methods approach, in conjunction with knowledge from literature, suggests the following:

P&Cs operate in a wide range of schools throughout Western Australia, with complex, situational challenges requiring flexible approaches.

Approaches to increasing volunteer numbers and diversity are inseparable from approaches to developing any aspect of P&C functioning and community building.

P&C situational analysis, ideation, planning, activities, and operations can be improved using a four-dimensional model developed from emerging research themes.

The model, or framework, is based on four findings:

P&Cs that embed foundational principles of nonprofit and volunteer-led organising—identified in this research as volunteering, community, purpose, objectives, culture, process, and leadership—more readily attract and retain volunteers.

Positive change occurs when individuals and groups in the community reflect on and make sense of their current situation, create options, find agency, resources and support, and act.

Initiatives by planners, doers, and relaters can all be successful, as can teamwork combining different styles.

People are drawn to and stay in P&Cs where they feel belonging, purpose, and enjoyment.

Scholarship on feedback format tends to demonstrate that students prefer video feedback; however, the characteristics of study participants are often absent. This study builds on the scholarship of feedback practice mediated by technology and feedback literacy in intercultural contexts. A mixed methods approach examined international postgraduate students' experience of, preferences for and attitudes towards three feedback formats: text, audio and video. Eighty-four participants in an Australian university completed a survey, and twelve participated in semi-structured phone interviews. The participants were mainly women from India, aged between 25 and 34 years old and declared English as a second language. Participants scored their experience with video, audio and written feedback. Written feedback was ranked first, followed by video and audio feedback. Participants reported that written feedback allows students to easily locate areas that need improvement. The role of the disciplinary traditions and respondents' educational background is discussed to make sense of the results.

This paper examines myths and misconceptions about university student volunteering. Our study explored the experiences of students, host organisations and universities participating in volunteering in Australia, identify good practice, and discover barriers to success. A qualitative approach involved 60 semi-structured interviews with stakeholders. Students were often seen as being energetic, having flexible time and having skills associated with their studies. Some organisations, however, viewed students as unreliable, hard to manage and requiring specific programs. Some hosts were viewed as not valuing student volunteers, or not having the capacity to supervise. These perceptions were found to be nuanced. Erroneous myths were seen to develop from a single event, later confirmed by a ‘related’ event; in scenarios with multiple players, motivations, and complexities. The potential for misconceptions to undermine the true value of student volunteering for all stakeholders is ameliorated when there is common understanding, clear expectation setting, and ongoing dialogue.

Mining has contributed to human development and technological prowess over several millennia. Accompanying this practical contribution has been a growing set of interrelated impacts that society has slowly began to acknowledge. The accumulation of externalities—or impacts on people and planet—are referred to as mining legacies, denoting both current and long-lived outcomes, ranging from pollution to community fragmentation to intergenerational embodiment. Mining legacies have origins, causes and impacts in both the physical process of mining and the industry's complex role in society, where it has been integral to colonial expansion, imperialism and global capitalism. This synthesis of the special issue Mining Legacies: Still breaking new ground explores the concept of mining legacies as a term capable of capturing a more expansive understanding of interrelated and complex impacts on society, where heterogeneous modes of existence clash with the dominant Western mining paradigm and global, capitalist development. Articulating a mining legacy lens contributes to orthodox debates on mining policy and managing specific impacts, while also challenging understandings of the underlying values, potential benefits, and externalities of extractive-led development. This synthesis also offers deeper insights into community agency and resistance as well as wellbeing and governance, also offering up possibilities for transforming negative legacies.

Purpose The purpose of this paper is to explore how performance management systems in nonprofit organizations are influenced by their funding sources. It explains how resources motivate organizations to diversify their strategies with attended performance management systems. Design/methodology/approach It adopts a qualitative case study approach involving semi-structured interviews with key informants in a nonprofit organization to understand the evolving nature of performance management systems associated with different funding sources. Findings The findings suggest that the case study organization changed its revenue base along with its performance management systems to satisfy the reporting and accountability requirements of different funding sources. Despite external funding sources detailing different restrictions and requirements, the overall performance management system was able to manage these different expectations. Research limitations/implications This study is based on a single case study, and its findings need to be interpreted with care, as there are differences between nonprofit organizations because they differ in their environments, services and funding. Originality/value This paper contributes to extant knowledge on how organizational performance management is influenced by funding sources, providing insights at the operational and governance levels.

While historically the extractives sector has done little to address the impacts of its activities (Harvey, 2014, 8), recent decades have seen resource companies “become more socially and environmentally conscious” (de Lange et al., 2018, 269). The sector appears to have undergone profound changes as reflected in industry discourses around sustainable and responsible mining and mining for development (International Council on Mining and Metals, 2001; International Institute for Environment and Development, 2002)...

University student volunteering is prevalent in Western countries, but has rarely been critically evaluated by researchers. Little is known about the different ways in which student volunteer programmes are organised. Using a matrix constructed from the publicly available websites of all Australian universities, and 60 interviews with key stakeholders at six universities, this paper identifies nine different models of student volunteer programmes. The models show the different ways in which universities, faculty and students are involved in organising student volunteer programmes. These nine models are presented in a continuum of increasing direct management by universities. In addition to identifying the models, the analysis revealed trends in student volunteering, particularly the way that Australian universities are packaging student volunteering as part of their service learning, leadership or employability agendas. The continuum facilitates a common language and understanding of university student volunteering, leading to cross-disciplinary recognition of the different models available.

Australian universities have a remit to produce work-ready graduates and engage students from equity groups. In engineering education, accredited Australian programs commonly respond to Engineers Australia’s required engagement with professional practice by mandating completion of a specified number of hours in work-integrated learning (WIL) placements as a graduation requirement. Placements are frequently self-sourced, under/unpaid, full-time and available at set times. These conditions, largely beyond students’ control, limit options for students supporting themselves through paid work and for students with family commitments. In an investigation framed by the theory of practice architectures, we addressed the question: What are the institutional preconditions shaping WIL placement practices that enable and constrain particular students’ access to, experience in, and leverage of professional learning at work for their future careers? Our analysis of three individual student interviews identified key student practices—applying for, doing, and leveraging placements—that are enabled and constrained by material-economic arrangements in family, university and work life, cultural-discursive arrangements in career development activities and social-political arrangements in personal and engineering networks. Identifying this architecture of practices is an important step towards an equitable transformation of WIL engineering placements.

Student volunteering has many benefits for students, universities, and nonprofit organizations (NPOs), but research on these from a multistakeholder perspective is scant. Using psychological contract theory, this article compares outcomes to expectations of students, universities, and NPOs, proposing a model of the benefits of volunteering to all three stakeholder groups. Based on a large-scale qualitative research with over 60 interviews in six Australian universities, the article offers an in-depth analysis of student volunteering benefits, surprises (benefits exceeding expectations), and disappointments (unmet expectations) for each stakeholder group. Some of these benefits align with existing literature, while others contribute new knowledge on the outcomes of student volunteering. The results show that training, preparation, and management of expectations have the potential to build positive benefits for all. It concludes with implications for universities and NPOs and directions for future research on student volunteering.