The ‘Listening Study’
As its first major research project, the ViCE Initiative brought together practitioners, volunteers and wider stakeholder to co-design a research approach to understand the lived experiences of volunteers in conflicts and emergencies and jointly develop responses to the challenges they face. Through a series of workshops and events, we worked as a team to understand each others’ needs and the contexts in which people were volunteering.
Our approach focused on listening to volunteers in an open way, avoiding pre-determined questions or ideas, and allowing participants to decide what is important to them and letting them talk about those issues in whatever way they choose. Through this, ViCE has created unique testimony of the experiences of volunteering in conflicts and emergencies.
198 volunteers and 84 wider stakeholders participated in 6 countries. In each country, a team visited volunteers and stakeholders, and asked them to talk about what it is like to be volunteer in that country. These conversations were recorded, translated, transcribed and analysed using practitioners’ views of the most important things being raised.
The findings have been shared through freely accessible working papers, workshops, and pop-innovation labs focused on finding practical solutions to challenges. Download the project thematic papers here.
Additional projects:
In addition to the ViCE Listening Study, a number of other research projects have been launched. The include:
Local volunteers in protracted crises: challenging invisibility in humanitarian and development settings: Doctoral Research Project, Bianca Fadel
Participatory digital technology and volunteer learning: Doctoral Research Project, Delvin Varghese
Health volunteers amongst displaced communities in Uganda: Northumbria Global Challenges Research Project led by Dr Aisling O’Loghlen, with Dr Katy Jenkins and Professor Matt Baillie Smith