Don’t You Want My Help? Volunteer Involvement and Management in Local Government

Abstract

The global COVID-19 health pandemic has put extraordinary pressure on already fiscally strapped local governments. As local jurisdictions search for strategies to meet rising service expectations with declining resources, use of volunteers would seem to offer significant advantages. This study examines the involvement of volunteers to deliver services in all county governments in one U.S. state, as well as the factors that explain the extent of use of this service approach. Our analysis is based on information collected from a survey of county government officials working in 10 service domains, supplemented by demographic and other data drawn from a variety of sources. To arrive at valid estimates of volunteer involvement in the delivery of county services, we introduce a novel methodology that corrects our survey data for possible sample and response biases based on a calibration estimator using auxiliary information. The results of our inquiry reveal a higher use of volunteers to deliver services by county governments than suggested by the literature. The findings show, moreover, that counties with higher per capita income, greater percentage of residents attaining a bachelor’s degree or higher formal education, and lower unemployment are likely to involve volunteers in the delivery of more services, as are those county governments with greater per capita spending and per capita property tax revenues. These results have important implications in regard to the capacity of local governments to use volunteers, which we treat in the Discussion.

Juneau, Alaska’s Successful Response to COVID-19: A Case Study of Adaptive Leadership in a Complex System

“…A third alternative explanation is that Juneau was better off than other cities in Alaska in terms of the socio-economic characteristics of its population and therefore had better outcomes. One could argue, for example, that Juneau did better than other places because its residents benefited from greater wealth, higher incomes, more education, and a strong Indigenous knowledge network, with a powerful oral tradition fostering caution due to memories of the 1918 pandemic ( Brudney and Yoon 2021 ; Petrov et al 2021 ). Generally, as Table 3 shows, Juneau does perform better on these indicators than other areas of Alaska that had higher death rates.…”