What does the voluntary civic service change within the French voluntary sector? Impacts on volunteers, paid staff, and the voluntary sector as a whole.
Résumé
In France, the civic service, as introduced by the law n ° 2010-241 of March 10th, 2010, is a policy which allows young people aged 16 to 25 to engage in a non-profit organization for 6 to 12 months. The young person must dedicate 25 to 48 hours a week to a mission that is of general interest for the society, being compensated by an indemnity of about 580 euros. The major part of this indemnity (470 €) is paid directly by the State. The rest is left to the responsibility of the organization that hosts the 'volontaire' (a French word that we will be using to refer to this particular status, and that differs from 'bénévole' that designates unpaid volunteers).
From its beginning, the civic service has reached a growing number of young people. Financed by a 390 million euros budget in 2017, it is one of the few programs the Macron government proposed to increased, in the current period of budget cuts. The 2018 budget is 480 million euros for an objective of 150 000 young people enrolled, that is about the fourth of one generation.
Employment in the voluntary sector has been characterized as atypical. Voluntary sector employees being working with volunteers, and, at least in France, with ‘volontaires’, they evolve in a space where commitment and non-lucrativity are normative, in-between of paid work and volunteering. Hély (2009) and Simonet (2010) demonstrated how difficult it is to differentiate, as regard the workforce market, volunteers from paid workers. This is all the more the case for the ‘volontaires’ who have a hybrid status between the two extremes of the halo of the association workforce (Gontier, Dansac, et Vachée 2014; Krinsky et Simonet 2017).
Drawing from the results of questionnaires completed by ‘volontaires’ and from interviews with paid staff, field volunteers, and board members, we will explore 1) how young people use this experience in their career plans, their motivations (Clary et al. 1998), and the changes that are provoked in their attitudes toward volunteering, and 2) the impact of the presence of this new kind of workforce on the non-profit sector. Paid staff as well as board members testify that its presence within small associations affects crucially their internal functioning. The resulting changes will be exposed, as well as the perspective for the whole sector workforce.