Volunteering is a complex word. Much more complex than it appears at first glance.
In the past, and I am talking about a certain generation, volunteering often had a different meaning from what it should have. Not for everyone, to be clear, and I do not want to paint everyone with the same brush. But for many it meant filling free time, that time that arrived after an intense working life and needed to be occupied with something socially acceptable. An end in itself, often self-referential, built around power dynamics and habit rather than genuine usefulness.
This created the foundations of many associations that exist today, and that deserves recognition. But the method, the deeper meaning, that was often wrong. And you still see it today in those who demand sacrifice without question, do not innovate, do not change their communication register, do not update. In those who defend the status quo because the status quo is the only thing they know.
Resilience and antifragility: the combo that changes everything
Is the situation therefore tragic? No. And here I want to introduce two concepts I find fundamental, often confused but profoundly different.
Resilience is the ability to withstand shocks and return to the original form. It is important, necessary, but it has a limit: it brings you back to where you were before. Antifragility, a concept developed by Nassim Taleb, goes further. Those who are antifragile do not simply resist, they improve through shocks. Difficulties become fuel for evolution, not obstacles to overcome.
Among younger volunteers, and not just younger in terms of age, I see this combo more and more often. Smaller numbers than in the past, but different quality. People working to change messages, modify structures, evolve them. And some boomers, those who stop thinking like boomers, make the smartest choice they can make: becoming advisors of wisdom instead of guardians of the past.
How Greta and I live it
Greta and I do it in almost diametrically opposite ways, and it works precisely because of that.
She is on the ground, an active volunteer with clear ideas and a concrete presence in difficult situations. I, driven by my work and the way I think, move more on what I like to call complex systems: words, changes, people, the mechanisms that hold an organisation together or pull it apart.
Different approaches, strong integration. Because the nuances of volunteering are many, and covering them all requires different people moving in different ways toward the same goal.
When the status quo makes you hate what you loved
There is something that deeply bothers me in this world. Seeing someone slow things down, obstruct, and eventually lead you to no longer tolerate or worse hate an organisation you loved. It happens when the status quo and particular interests end up damaging you, directly or indirectly, in a heavy way.
It happened close to me, in a local reality I will not name. And I know what it means to find yourself loving something less that you once loved, to feel that passion transform into exhaustion and bitterness. My mind fortunately can still tell me “this is one reality, Luca, not all of them.” But getting there is not a given.
At Croce Verde something is moving instead. Slowly, with the patience that every real change requires. And I hope the facts, step by step, confirm it.
An invitation, without rhetoric
I close with an honest provocation.
Volunteering has many nuances. Before saying “I do not have time” or “it is not for me”, investigate. What seems trivial or out of reach often is not. There are forms of volunteering that adapt to your life, not the other way around.
And on distance adoptions, or similar initiatives, I want to pause for a moment. I know the automatic response is “I do not have that money.” But that money, in most cases, is the equivalent of one aperitivo a month. I wrote months ago about money as numbers and variables, about how emotion distorts our relationship with it. Apply it here. Do not ask yourself “do I have that money?” but “what do those numbers do?” What do those figures concretely produce in the world.
I am not wealthy, quite the opposite. And yet knowing that over all these years I have helped contribute to the lives of children and families makes me something more than useful. It makes me happy.