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Investigating Volunteer Motivations and Nonprofit Best Practices: the Potential for Nonprofit Activism to Drive Sociocultural Change
As an intern for the small nonprofit City Fruit, I helped the harvesters gather unwanted fruit from residential trees and public orchards all over Seattle, which we distributed to local food banks. As our daily hauls were supplemented by weekly volunteer harvests, I wanted to investigate the volunteers’ motivations, as well as the industry prescribed practices for building a strong volunteer base. In addition to completing a literature review on the subject, I conducted a brief survey of City Fruit volunteer motivations. Volunteers seem driven by intangible rewards and hold potential to act as catalysts of sociocultural change.
