Navigating Boundaries: Brokerage Strategies in Volunteer-Paid Staff Collaborations

Background and purpose: In welfare states, non-profit organizations increasingly rely on volunteers to meet growing social service demands amid austerity measures. As such, volunteers are integrated alongside paid staff to support vulnerable populations, assuming their skills, experiences, and networks complement professional expertise. This volunteer integration, however, can be challenging. Tensions may arise due to unclear boundaries, especially when volunteers are perceived by paid staff as infringing on professional roles. While much of the existing literature uses an attribute approach by framing volunteer-paid staff collaborations through a fixed task division, our study adopts a relational approach which recognizes boundaries of the professional and voluntary domain as actively constructed through negotiation. Furthermore, studies mainly focus on how paid staff maintain boundaries, overlooking the active role of volunteers in such boundary negotiations. Understanding how boundaries are navigated thus requires an examination of the roles played by both paid staff and volunteers.

The theoretical frameworks of boundary work and brokerage provide critical lenses for this exploration. Boundary work unpacks acts of demarcation and spanning of boundaries of the professional domain. Brokerage theory sheds light on the intermediary strategies employed by coordinating professionals to influence volunteer integration by facilitating or withholding resource sharing. By combining the frameworks of brokerage and boundary work, our research addresses two research questions: (1) Which brokerage strategies do paid staff use in their collaboration with volunteers? (2) How do volunteers and paid staff negotiate boundaries in their collaboration?

Methods: We conducted semi-structured interviews with 30 paid employees and volunteers from three different nonprofit organizations in Flanders, Belgium. Discussions covered three main topics: (1) general collaboration; (2) information and advice networks; and (3) areas of tension. Interviews were transcribed verbatim and coded thematically using Nvivo.

Findings: We identified three themes that depict configurations of paid staff-volunteer collaboration. These configurations reflect the extent to which paid staff integrate volunteers, forming a continuum from minimal volunteer integration, where boundaries of the professional domain are strictly demarcated, to extensive volunteer integration, where volunteer expertise is blended into the professional domain. In each configuration, we outline brokerage strategies paid staff use to either demarcate, span or blend boundaries between them and volunteers. Additionally, our results demonstrate the impact of volunteer strategies on their level of integration.

Conclusion and implications: Configurations that occur are not fixed, as they fluctuate throughout time depending on strategies deployed by all actors involved. Therefore, attention should be paid to boundary negotiation processes including both paid staff and volunteers to capture relational dynamics influencing collaborative efforts. In practice, to effectively utilize the complementary skills of volunteers and paid staff, all contributions must be acknowledged and tasks assigned based on compatibility, rather than status. As such, boundaries of the professional and voluntary domain are to be demarcated to avoid conflict, but also flexible and adaptable to resources and actors involved.