Aims & Objectives - Keele University
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Exploring Personal Communities

Aims & Objectives

The aim of the project is to explore the personal community through the lens of volunteering in order to shed light on the ways in which individuals experience and adjust to one another within and across communities.  It aims to give individuals and communities in Stoke-on-Trent an opportunity to engage with the findings of our literature review in order to reflect on their own experiences and imagine/design new agendas that could make a difference to the quality of their life.

There are six objectives:

  1. Define personal community: for example, to what extent is the personal community different from friendship and charity?
  2. Establish the central role of volunteering in the making of personal communities;
  3. Understand the rationale of volunteering: for example, why do people volunteer in the current context of heightened individualism and consumerism?
  4. Explore the unfolding of volunteering work and the impact it has on individual volunteers by reviewing volunteering processes;
  5. Provide a critique of managerialist accounts of managing the voluntary sector in order to offer a more nuanced understanding of  volunteering  as a way of negotiating issues of community identity, diversity exclusion and cohesion;
  6. Document the social outcomes of personal communities: how does volunteering contribute to the greater good of the community and overall society in terms of well being?