Volunteering in Religious Communities: Does it Contribute to Society? Calculating Social Yield

Abstract

In a special issue of Research on Social Work Practice 21 (4), 2011, Ram Cnaan and Thomas McLauglin launch an academic debate about ways to quantify the accomplishments of social work and social services as unique contributions to society. They argue that for too long social work has failed to claim this contribution since it was not expressed as a monetary value but only justified by recording and reporting what social work does. Cnaan and McLaughlin notice that whereas the for-profit private sector easily accounts for the value of items or services in monetary terms, the non-profit fields that rely on ‘soft’ technologies find it difficult to assess their value to society with the economic denominator of money as a criterion for valuation. Cnaan and McLaughlin call for a debate about valuation and cost-effectiveness in social work and social services, ‘assessing the financial value of a public good or a problem’ (2011, p. 386). According to them, this way is challenging, complex but needed, and will be ubiquitous in the future (2011, p. 385–387). A similar suggestion is made by Ros Scott (2011) in relation to the assessment of the value of volunteers working in hospitals: ‘If volunteers are to be fully recognized as a strategic asset, we must be brave enough also to describe volunteers in business terms.’