Why coming back
matters

01What we hope will change

Transformative volunteering is designed around prosocial identity change, where a person comes to understand caring for others as part of who they are and begins to carry that understanding into how they live. RW Institute describes the change across three dimensions, which give us different things to pay attention to over time.

Someone may feel a strong connection to a cause while holding the same assumptions about it, just as another person may rethink an assumption and still struggle to act differently. A regular volunteer may also keep volunteering quite separate from the rest of their life, so we need room for that unevenness when we design experiences and ask what they have made possible.

Attendance tells us who came, but understanding what changed takes a longer conversation. Without it, we risk asking a satisfying afternoon or a full registration list to explain more than either can tell us.

02Returning gives people more to learn about themselves

A first experience gives someone one occasion to notice themselves contributing, while returning gives them another, perhaps under different conditions. They might choose to stay with a task when it becomes complicated or take responsibility for welcoming someone new, and over time they have more experience to draw on when deciding what kind of person they understand themselves to be.

Adam Grant develops this possibility in Giving Time, Time After Time, proposing that volunteering can meet needs people find insufficiently met in their jobs, including meaningful contribution and belonging. When those needs are met, employees may participate again and begin to internalize a volunteer identity, although his model also considers the conditions around participation, including managerial support and pressure to volunteer.

Michael Gill’s study of pro bono volunteering in the English legal profession offers a closer look at how that identity can develop. Through interviews, observations, and documents, he traced how colleagues’ examples and conversations helped people connect volunteering with their own sense of what mattered. His explanation comes from that particular setting, and the study did not test whether repeated visits cause identity change.

For a practitioner, these ideas suggest paying attention when a returning volunteer wants to take on more responsibility. Someone who needed clear instructions on their first visit may now want to help a new participant get started, and we can offer that opportunity while leaving the choice with them.

Tourist-Traveler-Guide helps us read what someone needs in a particular experience. In a Guide state, a person has made the change part of who they are and can help others work through uncertainty, but they may still need the structure a Tourist needs when encountering another issue. Counting their previous visits won’t tell us what they need today, which is why a Check-in can be more useful than an assumption about their experience.

03A second encounter can complicate the first explanation

People can leave a volunteer event with their assumptions confirmed because the work felt useful and fitted what they already believed about the community. There may be real value in that afternoon, but we should be careful about calling it convictional change when the person’s explanation of the issue remains much the same.

Convictional change involves reconsidering an explanation after a conversation, a partner’s expertise, or something about the work fails to fit the picture a person brought with them. RW’s approach draws on Jack Mezirow’s account of transformative learning, where critical reflection asks us to examine the assumptions that shaped what we saw and whether they still hold up. A person can remember an experience in detail without ever getting to that question.

One encounter can start the reconsideration, and returning allows a person to ask a question they didn’t know to ask before or spend longer with an issue they initially understood too simply. For that to happen, the partner’s knowledge has to be part of the experience, with opportunities for volunteers to listen and work alongside people who understand the community in ways they don’t yet.

Pettigrew and Tropp’s 2006 meta-analysis found that intergroup contact typically reduces prejudice, while their 2008 analysis of possible mediators found stronger support for reduced anxiety and increased empathy and perspective-taking than for increased knowledge. For a practitioner, this suggests making room for conversation and relationship alongside the Brief, although the studies don’t tell us how many volunteer visits will change someone’s convictions or establish that a volunteer event provides the conditions for constructive contact.

The 2006 review found stronger prejudice reduction when contact involved cooperation toward a shared goal, equal standing within the encounter, and support from the organizations involved. We have to work with the community partner to make those conditions possible, and a With posture means their knowledge and priorities shape both the work and the contact volunteers are invited into. An employee’s opportunity to learn cannot take precedence over the people whose work makes the experience possible.

We also need to consider how the experience is arranged when we invite people back. If every visit preserves the same distance between the people helping and the people being helped, repetition may leave a narrow understanding intact and make it more familiar.

04People need opportunities to act on what they’re learning

A person may leave a Debrief intending to do something differently, but later they still have to make the call, invite the colleague, or change a decision. Those choices tell us something the intention alone cannot, which is why a sequence of experiences needs opportunities to try, receive feedback, and choose whether to continue.

Someone might take responsibility for part of the next event or mentor another volunteer, and they may also connect what they’ve learned to an assumption in their workplace. The program can make opportunities available and ask what follows, while recognizing that a person’s choices beyond the event belong to them.

The reasons people keep contributing matter too. In two field studies, Grant found that prosocial motivation was more strongly associated with persistence, performance, and productivity when people also had intrinsic motivation. The participants were firefighters and fundraising callers, so applying the finding to employee volunteering requires an inference; the studies did not test whether a volunteering incentive changes identity.

Grant’s 2012 model also raises the question of how much choice an employee has when a manager encourages them to participate. Pressure can secure attendance while leaving us unsure what the employee would freely choose, so a program seeking prosocial identity change needs meaningful choices about both participation and responsibility.

A facilitator has to leave room for an answer they didn’t expect as well. The Debrief can invite someone to connect the experience to life elsewhere, without deciding in advance what they should take from it or what they ought to do next.

05The next Brief should remember the last Debrief

A sequence becomes purposeful when what happens in one experience helps shape the next, and Brief-Check-in-Debrief gives practitioners a way to carry that attention through every event. Conducting the Brief, checking in during the work, and conducting the Debrief are the Three Keystone Behaviors.

The Brief connects participants with the people and issue, explains why the task matters, and opens a question that may unsettle an assumption they brought with them. RW Institute’s facilitator script recommends a concrete, respectful story and space for the community partner to explain their work, and a return visit also gives us the chance to pick up a question the group raised previously or explain something that has changed for the partner.

During the work, a Check-in helps the champion discover what each person needs, whether that is help finding materials, a conversation about the cause, or an opportunity to support a new participant. Asking and listening gives the champion a better basis for responding than assuming everyone with the same number of visits is ready for the same thing.

The Debrief starts with two questions from the RW Institute script: “What did you experience?” and “Was it what you expected?” People can answer from their own experience, including the parts that surprised or unsettled them, and what they say should influence the next invitation.

If the group was surprised by the partner’s capacity, the next Brief could give more attention to the partner’s expertise. If people felt helpless, we might work with the partner to identify a role in which their contribution is clearer, while an unresolved question may deserve another conversation if the partner wants to have it. Some of the tasks may stay exactly the same, because continuity comes from responding to what people are learning while doing them.

What people say in the Debrief should help shape what we invite them into next.

06A sequence the partner can sustain

You don’t need to map someone’s development across a year before inviting them to a first event, although you do need to know how they could return and how the next experience might respond to what happened. Start with a partner relationship that can support continuity, with enough structure for new volunteers to participate comfortably and room for later visits to develop according to what the partner needs and the volunteers are ready to offer.

Some returning participants may want to welcome newcomers or help facilitate, in which case the program needs to give them practice and feedback in conducting the Brief, checking in, and leading the Debrief. Others may want to keep doing useful work in a familiar role, and a developmental sequence should leave them free to contribute without having to demonstrate progress through a set of stages.

Partner capacity sets a real limit, because more visits can mean more coordination and the partner may have good reasons to prefer a different arrangement. A program built around relationship has to make room for that answer, even when it complicates the sequence we had in mind.

07Ask about change after people leave

Keep counting participation, and also ask questions that help you understand what the count leaves out. For psychological change, that means listening to how participants now understand their role and asking for an example when they describe a different sense of responsibility or ownership. A familiar phrase about being “someone who cares” becomes more useful when the person can connect it to a choice they made.

For convictional change, ask which assumptions they reconsidered and how they now explain the issue, while leaving them room to be uncertain. If we reward the program’s preferred vocabulary, we make it harder to learn what people actually think.

For behavioral change, follow up on what happened beyond the event and ask how the person connects it to the experience. They may have taken initiative, mentored a colleague, or changed a workplace decision, but we still need to compare their accounts over time and investigate what contributed to the change before attributing it to the program.

The community partner also needs to be part of that assessment, with a chance to say whether the volunteers’ contributions were useful and whether the relationship respected their priorities. Employee learning is one part of the work we’re evaluating, and the partner may have a different view of how well an experience served its purpose.

08A field guide for the next experience

The Champion’s Field Guide: Go Deeper on Why We Help is a Realized Worth companion for people facilitating volunteer experiences. It connects the facilitation cycle to ideas about attention, learning, and repetition, with practical prompts and a 30-day checklist that champions can use while preparing and return to as their questions change.

The guide also links to videos by psychiatrist and educator Dr. Tracey Marks, including material on habits, emotional regulation, and holding space. They offer an accessible way into concepts a facilitator may recognize in themselves or the people they’re supporting, while the original studies remain the place to examine an evidence claim.

An explanation of how practice affects the brain does not establish what a particular volunteering program will produce, so the guide’s practical prompts can be useful without treating every neuroscience explanation as a tested account of the volunteering experience.

09Start with what people left wondering

The evidence discussed here supports parts of the case for repeated experiences, although it does not establish a required number of visits or prove that a sequence will produce prosocial identity change. Connecting experiences is a design inference: people get more opportunities to reconsider what they believe and act on what they’re learning, with support from a continuing relationship.

When you prepare the next event, return to the last Debrief and find a question the group left open. Talk with the community partner about whether, and how, it belongs in the next experience, then write the Brief with that conversation in mind.

10Further reading

1. Grant (2012), Giving Time, Time After Time. A theoretical model of sustained employee volunteering and volunteer identity. Useful for thinking about why people return and how program conditions may influence what participation means to them.

2. Gill (2023; first published online in 2021), Understanding the Spread of Sustained Employee Volunteering: How Volunteers Influence Their Coworkers’ Moral Identity Work. A qualitative study in the English legal profession connecting coworkers’ influence with volunteer identity formation. Offers a context-specific explanation, rather than a test of how many experiences cause change.

3. Grant (2008), Does Intrinsic Motivation Fuel the Prosocial Fire?. Research with firefighters and fundraising callers. Helps explain why wanting to benefit others and finding the activity intrinsically motivating should be considered together. Adjacent evidence for volunteering design.

4. Pettigrew and Tropp (2006), A Meta-Analytic Test of Intergroup Contact Theory. Evidence on contact and prejudice across settings. Useful when making a case for constructive contact, with care about applying it to a particular volunteer experience.

5. Pettigrew and Tropp (2008), How Does Intergroup Contact Reduce Prejudice?. Examines anxiety, empathy and perspective-taking, and knowledge as possible mediators. Helps explain why providing information alone may leave part of the learning opportunity unexplored.

6. RW Institute, Brief and Debrief Scripts for Volunteer Experiences. The practitioner source for the reflection questions used here. The PDF uses an earlier name for the middle Keystone Behavior; this article uses the current Brief-Check-in-Debrief terminology.

7. Realized Worth, The Champion’s Field Guide: Go Deeper on Why We Help. Preparation prompts, research links, and supplemental videos for champions. A practice resource to use alongside the original studies.

8. Mezirow (1990), How Critical Reflection Triggers Transformative Learning. The theoretical foundation for examining assumptions and revising how an experience is understood. Helps explain the purpose of reflection; does not establish an effective volunteering schedule.