ABSTRACT
Volunteering is unpaid work. It involves time, energy, skills and/or abilities given freely in a context outside an individual’s home. The 2007 Canadian Survey of Giving, Volunteering and Participating (CSGVP 2009: 10) defined volunteering as ‘doing activities without pay on behalf of a group or organization’.2 A similar definition was used by Sport England in its national survey of sports volunteers: ‘individual volunteers helping others in sport and receiving either no remuneration or only expenses’ (Taylor et al. 2003: 6). Explicit in these definitions, and in all of the research relating to sports development, is the restriction to volunteering in groups, clubs, or organizations. National surveys show that large numbers of people report informal voluntary work, helping another individual or a small group of individuals,3 but little is known from an academic perspective about this type of volunteering, and there are no studies of informal volunteering in sport and recreation.
