These unprecedented times due to the COVID-19 pandemic have impacted the everyday lives of individuals. A particular activity impacted by this pandemic is leisure. Within leisure, an important activity to enhance social outcomes (e.g., civic participation) and the survival of organizations and events is volunteering. However, and given social distancing measures and the combination of postponements or cancelations of organizational or event operations, the traditional form of in-person volunteering is threatened. The purpose of this essay is to discuss opportunities and challenges for organizations and events to apply virtual volunteering as a strategy during the pandemic and beyond. Both opportunities (i.e., creating accessibility) and challenges (i.e., management process) are discussed according to pertinent literature. From this, an understanding of virtual volunteering's value to create leisure opportunities during the COVID-19 pandemic and beyond is presented to advance its implementation in organization and events by leisure practitioners.

Research question: This paper revisits our knowledge of sport organization governance design archetypes. To do so, we focus on Canadian national sport organizations (NSOs) and pose three research questions: (1) what governance design archetypes exist based on the use of more contemporary criteria; (2) how easily can an NSO's archetype be determined; and (3) what are the implications of these new archetypes for researchers and practitioners? Research methods: We undertook a landscape study of 32 Canadian NSOs with data from an online survey, publiclyavailable information, and clarification calls. Archetypes were derived from 47 organizational and governance characteristics using a k-means cluster analysis. Results and Findings: Our empirically-derived archetype design taxonomy showed the best fit to be four clusters (Board-led, Executive-led, Professional, and Corporate) based on key organizational values, complexity, capacity, revenue sources, and governance variables. Implications: Besides knowing NSOs are more heterogenous than in the past, researchers and practitioners can use capacity, efficiency, horizontal differentiation, broadcast revenue, political accountability, and social media information to derive an NSO's governance archetype. These findings imply researchers can (1) examine non-profit sport organizations' changes over time based on a set of archetypes reflecting contemporary realities, and (2) compare and contrast NSOs' governance more holistically. In turn, managers can better compare their NSO with other NSOs to optimize their organization's performance. Finally, national sport agencies/funders should support NSOs' governance improvement efforts through flexible guidelines and resources because of NSOs' governance heterogeneity.

No abstract

No abstract

Sport event volunteers have predominantly been examined in able-bodied events using quantitative methods. Studies examining the volunteer experience have focused on its relationship with different constructs, resulting in a siloed body of literature in which a holistic understanding of the volunteer experience remains poor. The purpose of this study was to explore the relationships between key constructs (satisfaction, motivation, commitment, and sense of community) and the first author’s (E.L. Lachance) volunteer experience in a para-sport event. The analysis of the narrative using a volunteer experience conceptual framework composed of the key volunteer constructs identified two themes: (a) the power of sense of community and (b) the volunteer role as a source of dissatisfaction. Contributions include the volunteer experience conceptual framework and the relationships between the four constructs and the volunteer experience. Event managers should implement strategies to create a strong sense of community to enhance their volunteers’ experience.