Across Europe, voluntary organisations are increasingly understood to be sites of informal learning. In European liberal democracies, governments seek to encourage populations to give their time freely and volunteer. This is because it is widely assumed that volunteering will increase active participation in democratic processes, and promotes learning in social inclusion, social cohesion and integration, which tend to be regarded as important features of successful democratic societies.

This paper focuses on a case study of the Technisches Hilfswerk, (THW), a volunteer force for disaster assistance in Germany with 80,000 volunteers. The main task of the THW is to lead clean-up operations after disasters such as flooding and storms. The THW is in fact a Federal Institute of the Ministry of the Interior, founded in 1953, and therefore has a particularly close relationship with the German state and democracy. Whilst the numbers involved in volunteering in Germany and in the EU as a whole are gradually rising, the numbers of citizens from “migrant backgrounds” who volunteer remains very low, especially in organisations such as the THW. This study explores the relationship between volunteering, learning for democracy and race.

The paper employs firstly the notion of Volunteering Culture (Duguid et al, 2006), which argues the characteristics of the individual volunteering organisations are all different, and will influence the type of learning which takes place, the volunteers’ motivations for joining or not joining, and their (potential) experiences.  Secondly it draws on insights from Critical Race Theory (Gillborn, 2008; Chadderton 2013), and on theories of European whiteness (Linke, 1999; Arndt, 2009), in order to develop a framework for analysis of structural racism relevant to a European setting.  This approach is very innovative in mainland Europe where an explicit debate about race remains taboo (Moschel, 2007), particularly in education settings. 

Arndt, S. 2009. Weisssein. Die verkannte Strukturkategorie Europas und Deutschlands. In Mythen, Masken und Subjekte, edited by M.M. Eggers, G. Kilomba, P. Piesche and S. Arndt, 24-28. Muenster: Unrast Verlag. Chadderton, C. (2013) Towards a research framework for race in education: Critical Race Theory and Judith Butler. International Journal of Qualitative Studies in Education 26:1, pp.39-55. Duguid, F., Slade, B. and Schugurensky, D. (2006) Unpaid work, informal learning and volunteer cultures, Paper presented at the 36th Annual SCUTREA Conference, 4-6 July, Trinity and All Saints College, Leeds Gillborn, D. 2008. Racism and education: Coincidence or conspiracy? London: Routledge. Linke, U. (1999) German Bodies. Race and representation after Hitler. New York, London: Routledge. Moschel, M. 2007. Color-blindness or total blindness? The absence of CRT in Europe. Rutgers Race and the Law Review 9, no. 1: 57–128.