Based on long-term ethnographic fieldwork, this book explores the learning and literacy dimensions of local volunteering for social change in the Philippines. It tells the story of youth and adult volunteers who experience vulnerabilities yet play central roles in local development efforts in housing and sexual health. Why do people who themselves experience vulnerability volunteer to help others? And what are their learning experiences in the process? In its unique application of a literacy lens to the study of volunteering, the book unravels how marginalised groups, often seen as ‘thankful receivers’, (re)use texts, words and labels to (re)define their roles in shaping social change and for whose benefit. Chris Millora provides an in-depth look into the volunteers’ everyday activities such as delivering community health classes, filling out donor forms and applying for government approvals. In doing so, this book reveals how volunteers’ voices and agency were constrained to fit a certain bureaucratic way of working. It offers powerful case studies on how global development agendas such as value-for-money, upskilling and professionalisation – through bureaucratic literacies – impact the experiences of volunteers at the grassroots level. Arguing that literacy and volunteering could enhance inequalities within groups, this book calls for a renewed focus on the role that power and identities play both in adult/youth literacy and volunteering research.
