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Volunteer Participation as a Contributor to Healthy Communities
Theme: Participation in voluntary organizations can be a means
of developing healthy social environments and healthy communities.
Social Environments and Health
- The social environment is a health resource for community residents:
community bonds, social interaction, and relationships that promote
co-operation tend to ease the stresses of daily life.
- Cohesion in a community reflects group membership, civic participation,
community networks, levels of trust, and information-sharing inherent
in social relations. For instance, cohesion means that a widowed senior
would be watching out for her neighbour's children boarding and disembarking
from a schoolbus, while her neighbours keep an eye out for the widow's
house while she is absent.
- These factors are resources for coping with stress, and are conducive
to health, well-being and healthy lifestyle behaviours. Increases in
community participation, such as membership in voluntary organizations
and levels of trust in a community, are reflected in increases in community
health.
- Research by Kawachi and his colleagues in the United States ties low
interpersonal trust and low group membership in a community to poor
health and higher mortality rates.
Volunteering: developing community ties
- Social participation through volunteering is an important element
of healthy, integrated and secure communities.
- In communities where educational and financial resources are low,
developing social cohesion may improve health.
- Volunteer organizations positively impact factors that influence health,
by encouraging interaction between community members.
- Because of their relationship to community involvement and social
networks, volunteer activities may enhance the benefits of community
approaches to health promotion.
SOURCES
Lomas, J. (1998). "Social capital and health: implications for public
health and epidemiology", Social Science and Medicine, 47(9): 1181-1188.
Gillies, P. (1998). "Effectiveness of alliances and partnerships
for health promotion", Health Promotion International, 13(2): 99-120.
Putnam, Robert. (2000). Bowling Alone: the collapse and revival of American
community. New York: Simon and Schuster.
Kawachi, I., et al. (1997). "Social capital, income inequality and
mortality", American
Journal of Public Health, 87(9): 1491-1498.
Kawachi, I., and Kennedy, B. (1997). "Health and social cohesion:
why care about income inequality?", British Medical Journal, 314(5
April): 1037-1040.
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