Youth Sport Volunteering: developing social capital

Since 1997 the UK has energetically deployed sport in pursuit of diverse social policy agendas including enhancing health, engaging disaffected youth, countering anti-social behaviour and contributing to community well-being. The extent to which the intended social outcomes are definable, realistic and measurable has however been queried, as has the causal role that sport can play in achieving them. This chapter will address aspects of this debate through a focus on the capacity of youth sport volunteering to develop social capital. Youth sports volunteering ‘ticks the boxes’ of a number of topical UK policy agendas, providing a form of social participation that potentially engages young people in community-oriented activities, empowers them as resourceful individuals and contributes to the development of citizenship and social capital. These concepts are however much disputed and the debate surrounding the associated policy agendas is intense. Here we will analyse the extent to which young people’s experiences of volunteering in sport may match or fall short of these policy expectations, drawing on qualitative data from the on-going evaluation of the national ‘Step into Sport’ youth volunteer initiative. The chapter will show that volunteering elicits varied responses from young people, but in a minority of cases offers a route for positive achievement for those who are otherwise particularly disaffected. The chapter will suggest that there is sufficiently robust evidence to claim that sports volunteering can contribute to the development of social capital, but only in some circumstances and only for some young people.