Volunteering in community sport organizations: Implications for social capital

Abstract

Local sports clubs are an important component of the formal and informal social networks that underpin the creation, development and maintenance of social capital. Local community based sport clubs provide opportunities for community members to come together on a regular basis to play, facilitate and watch sport as well as enabling club members to participate and engage in the wider social networks that are connected through various formal and informal mechanisms to sport. The collective term community sport organizations (CSOs) is used in this chapter to describe local sport clubs which have been variously labelled as voluntary sport organizations, amateur sport clubs, community amateur sport clubs and grassroots sport organizations. Sport England (2005a) adequately captured the concept of CSOs when it defined community amateur sports clubs as:This chapter focuses on volunteers because it is individuals who are engaged in the operation of CSOs who are more likely to impact on the development of social capital than those who are simply members by virtue of being players or being related to a player (e.g. parent of a junior player). Volunteering and participation in voluntary organizations are important components in the comprehensive measurement of social capital. Putnam (2000: 291) used a number of independent measures to compile what he defined as a social capital index. Of the 14 independent measures that comprised the social capital index, half were associated with volunteering and voluntary organizations, most of which correlated highly with the index score overall. While none of the independent index measures were exclusively in the domain of sport, they encompassed CSOs and the types of activities that occur frequently within them. The seven social capital index components most closely associated with CSOs were measures of community organizational life and volunteering and included:● Percentage of individuals who served on a committee of a local organization in the last year (correlation with social capital index 0.88).