In search of volunteers

A rooted NGO has relationships, local credibility and the ability to mobilise people

Walk into any climate conference in Karachi and you will meet founders. Each leads an NGO with a name, a logo and a social media page. What is harder to find is the crowd behind them. Over the years I have come to suspect that many of our environmental groups are not movements but individuals, and that their apparent size has more to do with the last grant than with any lasting community support.

An NGO is known almost entirely by its founder's face. Then funding arrives, and suddenly there are coordinators, project officers, consultants and a team photograph. The workforce looks impressive, but it was assembled by a budget line. When the project closes, the team thins out, and the founder is once again the outfit. This is the difference between a body with a volunteer base and one with a payroll. Volunteers stay when there is no money. Employees, quite reasonably, do not.

Language has become part of the problem. People recruited for an event, handed a T-shirt and paid a daily wage or an incentive are often described in reports as volunteers. They are not. Someone who performs an assigned task for payment is an event worker, and there is nothing shameful in that; honest work deserves honest pay. The problem lies in the label, which borrows the moral credit of volunteerism while hiding the transaction.

Why is real volunteering so thin in Pakistan? Part of the answer is structural. Political parties offer workers something that civil society rarely can: access, networks, visibility and standing, especially for those near a governing party. A phone call from the right office can open doors that years of unpaid NGO work will not. This is an observation about incentives, not about any party.

Yet the fault is not only outside. Inside some established NGOs, the staff control the projects, the budgets and the access, and a newcomer finds little room. Volunteers are sometimes treated as subordinates and handed tasks, rather than welcomed as the NGO's most important constituency. This reverses a basic principle of civil society. Paid staff should exist to support and facilitate a wider volunteer movement, not the other way round. When volunteers become unpaid assistants to a professional bureaucracy, we should not be surprised that they leave.

The climate sector shows the consequences clearly. In my own work I have trained people over longer periods in climate education, activism and journalism. That is personal experience, and I offer it only as an illustration. Some of those participants went on to strengthen existing groups, which is genuinely wonderful. Others chose to register new ones of their own. I understand the instinct; ownership is attractive. But if every trained person founds another NGO, the sector multiplies letterheads without multiplying strength.

A quieter version exists. Some NGOs list many members yet function as one-person operations. The membership exists on paper and becomes active when a training, a trip, a certificate or some other benefit is on offer. A membership list is not a community, and a WhatsApp group that stirs only for opportunities is not a volunteer base.

Money deepens the distortion. Donors rightly want to fund credible partners, and recommendations from trusted contacts are a normal part of that process. Networking is not wrong. But when relationships and polished presentation begin to substitute for demonstrated community credibility, the system rewards those who are good at being seen. An NGO with strong donor connections can recommend others, and funding can circulate within a small professional circle. Once a large grant arrives, the NGO can start to resemble a company, hiring staff, consultants and event workers, and paying incentives to people brought into communities for project activities. The question donors should ask is uncomfortable but fair. Are they funding genuine civil-society institutions rooted in communities, or professional project-management entities that happen to carry the NGO label?

Comparisons between cities should be made carefully. Some Islamabad-based groups appear to draw more visible volunteer participation, though that does not make Karachi's peers weaker or the capital's stronger across the board. Proximity to federal institutions, government networks and influential individuals may play a part. Volunteers may also see association with a prominent NGO as a route to future project positions, paid assignments or visibility. That is human, and not necessarily cynical, but it reminds us that volunteering follows opportunity as much as idealism.

This brings us back to what an NGO is actually for. These bodies exist partly because the state cannot reach every neighborhood, or is not trusted when it does. A rooted NGO therefore has relationships, local credibility and the ability to mobilise people. Its strength is not the number of salaries a grant can cover. Capacity and legitimacy are different things, and a large payroll does not make a strong civil-society actor.

The way forward is less glamorous than launching another NGO. Small NGOs should consider mergers, alliances and shared platforms. Established ones should build real pathways for volunteers. Donors should test applicants against transparent criteria: community roots, verifiable volunteer participation, measurable outcomes, local credibility, sound governance, ability to survive beyond one grant, and evidence of mobilising communities rather than hiring people to run activities. Community roots must become the central test of legitimacy. Until we accept that hundreds of small, personality-driven NGOs weaken collective influence, we will struggle to build public pressure, shape policy or create a genuine climate movement.