Volunteering trajectories across crises: resilience, persistence and spill-over between ordinary and crisis volunteering

Abstract This study contributes to the sociology of volunteering and crisis research by analyzing the little studied relationship between crisis volunteering (addressing societal crises) and ordinary volunteering (unrelated to crises). This is achieved by examining sector level resilience of ordinary volunteering during crises, possible spill-over between ordinary and crisis volunteering, and the persistence of individual crisis volunteers across the COVID-19 pandemic in 2020–2022 and the reception of Ukrainian refugees fleeing Russia’s invasion in 2022. Using cross-sectional data from random samples of Danish adults before (n2020 = 3,519), during (n2021 = 1,700) and after (n2024 = 1,548) the pandemic, the results show that ordinary volunteering was highly resilient to the pandemic despite a significant reduction during the crisis. A five-round panel (n = 694) further shows that, while ordinary volunteering prior to the crisis correlated with crisis volunteering, crisis volunteering did not spill over into ordinary volunteering after the pandemic. Rather, crisis volunteers persisted engaging in crisis volunteering when Ukrainian refugees arrived. These findings have important implications for civil society studies because the absence of spill-over between ordinary and crisis volunteering suggests that the two types of volunteering operate according to distinct logics and the persistence of crisis volunteers across crisis challenges notions of crisis volunteering being spontaneous and emergent.