Volunteers

The long-awaited narrative history of the women who volunteered in Nova Scotia during the Second World War by award-winning journalist and author of No Place to Go. "I was home cooking carrots because my mother was off winning the war."-- Patricia Timbrell, whose mother, Amy Jones, along with her friend Una Smith, established and ran the Central Magazine Exchange, which distributed four million used magazines and 30,000 packs of cards by June 1942 alone for troop and merchant ships in Halifax Harbour. Halifax women won the Second World War -- but not in the ways you might have been told. We all know the stories of Canadian women during the war who trained as machinists, welders, and streetcar drivers to fill the shoes of men who answered the call. We know how women kept the home fires lit while their husbands, brothers, and fathers fought.This is not that story. The Volunteers: How Halifax Women Won the Second World War is the untold story of Halifax women who geared up in a flash to focus on the comfort, community connections, and mental health of Halifax?s exploding population of sailors, soldiers, airmen, and merchant mariners. They did a job no government could have organized or afforded. They did it without being asked. And they did it with no respite from their daily duties. Thoroughly researched and compellingly told, and with a dozen archival images, The Volunteers examines the untold stories of the hardworking women whose unpaid and unacknowledged labour won the Second World War.

COSTA BOOK AWARD WINNER: BOOK OF THE YEAR • #1 SUNDAY TIMES (UK) BESTSELLER “Superbly written and breathtakingly researched, The Volunteer smuggles us into Auschwitz and shows us—as if watching a movie—the story of a Polish agent who infiltrated the infamous camp, organized a rebellion, and then snuck back out. ... Fairweather has dug up a story of incalculable value and delivered it to us in the most compelling prose I have read in a long time.” —Sebastian Junger, author of The Perfect Storm and Tribe The incredible true story of a Polish resistance fighter’s infiltration of Auschwitz to sabotage the camp from within, and his death-defying attempt to warn the Allies about the Nazis’ plans for a “Final Solution” before it was too late. To uncover the fate of the thousands being interred at a mysterious Nazi camp on the border of the Reich, a thirty-nine-year-old Polish resistance fighter named Witold Pilecki volunteered for an audacious mission: assume a fake identity, intentionally get captured and sent to the new camp, and then report back to the underground on what had happened to his compatriots there. But gathering information was not his only task: he was to execute an attack from inside—where the Germans would least expect it. The name of the camp was Auschwitz. Over the next two and half years, Pilecki forged an underground army within Auschwitz that sabotaged facilities, assassinated Nazi informants and officers, and gathered evidence of terrifying abuse and mass murder. But as he pieced together the horrifying truth that the camp was to become the epicenter of Nazi plans to exterminate Europe’s Jews, Pilecki realized he would have to risk his men, his life, and his family to warn the West before all was lost. To do so, meant attempting the impossible—an escape from Auschwitz itself. Completely erased from the historical record by Poland’s post-war Communist government, Pilecki remains almost unknown to the world. Now, with exclusive access to previously hidden diaries, family and camp survivor accounts, and recently declassified files, Jack Fairweather offers an unflinching portrayal of survival, revenge and betrayal in mankind’s darkest hour. And in uncovering the tragic outcome of Pilecki’s mission, he reveals that its ultimate defeat originated not in Auschwitz or Berlin, but in London and Washington.

Museum Volunteers is a practical handbook on the use of volunteers as interpreters within museums. Drawing on key examples of outstanding practice from the UK and North America, this book forms a unique resource on volunteerism. This book: * reviews research on the changing priorities of museums * examines a form of volunteering that has provided benefits to all participants in an activity similar to museum interpretation - student tutoring * describes and analyses the strengths of five exceptional volunteer programmes in Canada and the USA * reports the finding of five volunteer programmes set up and managed by the authors in the Science Museum, London * examines the development process of the pilot studies and the consequent establishment of a permanent volunteer programme in the Science Museum, London * discusses the mutual benefits that volunteer programmes can bring to museums and volunteers * offers suggestions on the practical day-to-day management and administration of volunteers. This book is essential reading for anyone involved with the management and administration of a museum, or, is thinking of offering their services to a museum as a volunteer.

Recent years have seen an explosion in research on tourism volunteering. Volunteers are an essential part of tourism, whether they are volunteering in their local museum, at a sporting mega-event, as an airport ambassador, or travelling the global as a volunteer tourist. Managing Volunteers in Tourism reviews the latest research to highlight the key management issues and relate them to the tourism volunteering context. It includes previously under-researched forms of tourism volunteering such as meet-and-greeters, surf life-savers, conservation, festival, and information centre volunteers and volunTourists. The book develops through three distinct sections, the first of which begins by introducing the concept of volunteering and considering the variety of volunteer forms and settings within tourism. The next part picks up the organisational approach and examines volunteer program design and planning, volunteer motivation, recruitment and selection, training and development, reward and retention, and diversity management. The final part consists of ten case studies from leading international researchers and practitioners identifying best practice and key management challenges. Real-life examples and case studies throughout this book provide an in-depth examination of the challenges facing those managing tourism volunteers, making this book indispensible for current and future managers in the tourism industry.

An inside look at how community service organizations really work Volunteering improves inner character, builds community, cures poverty, and prevents crime. We've all heard this kind of empowerment talk from nonprofit and government-sponsored civic programs. But what do these programs really accomplish? In Making Volunteers, Nina Eliasoph offers an in-depth, humorous, wrenching, and at times uplifting look inside youth and adult civic programs. She reveals an urgent need for policy reforms in order to improve these organizations and shows that while volunteers learn important lessons, they are not always the lessons that empowerment programs aim to teach. With short-term funding and a dizzy mix of mandates from multiple sponsors, community programs develop a complex web of intimacy, governance, and civic life. Eliasoph describes the at-risk youth served by such programs, the college-bound volunteers who hope to feel selfless inspiration and plump up their resumés, and what happens when the two groups are expected to bond instantly through short-term projects. She looks at adult "plug-in" volunteers who, working in after-school programs and limited by time, hope to become like beloved aunties to youth. Eliasoph indicates that adult volunteers can provide grassroots support but they can also undermine the family-like warmth created by paid organizers. Exploring contradictions between the democratic rhetoric of empowerment programs and the bureaucratic hurdles that volunteers learn to navigate, the book demonstrates that empowerment projects work best with less precarious funding, more careful planning, and mandatory training, reflection, and long-term commitments from volunteers. Based on participant research inside civic and community organizations, Making Volunteers illustrates what these programs can and cannot achieve, and how to make them more effective.

​This volume overlooks the distinct expressions and awareness of volunteering in the lived reality of people from different regions of the world. By casting the net widely this book not only expands the geographic reach of experiences, models and case studies but also transcends the conventional focus on formal volunteering. It highlights institutional forms of volunteering specific to developing nations and also describes volunteering that is more loosely institutionalized, informal, and a part of solidarity and collective spirit. As a result this book provides a different look at the values, meaning, acts and expressions of volunteering. The chapters in this book consist of essays and case studies that present recent academic research, thinking and practice on volunteering. Working from the premise that volunteering is universal this collection draws on experiences from Latin America, Africa including Egypt, and Asia. This book focuses on developing countries and countries in transition in order to provide a fresh set of experiences and perspectives on volunteering. While developing countries and countries in transition are in the spotlight for this volume, the developed country experience is not ignored. Rather the essays use it as a critical reference point for comparisons, allowing points of convergence, disconnect and intersection to emerge.