Graduation Year

2012

Document Type

Thesis

Degree

M.A.

Degree Granting Department

Anthropology

Major Professor

Kevin Yelvington, D. Phil.

Committee Member

Antoinette Jackson, Ph.D.

Committee Member

Angela Stuesse, Ph.D.

Keywords

volunteer, neoliberalism, development, empowerment, community building

Abstract

This thesis provides an ethnographic account of a NGOs effort to recruit and retain volunteers. Specifically, this project is a program evaluation of a community-based grant designed as a bottom-up approach to empower community residents to make changes in their community. The study details the many efforts - and obstacles - involved in this process. It is presented as a contribution to the anthropology of policy, to evaluation theory, and to applied anthropological methods. The investigator used participant-observation fieldwork and ethnographic interviews of both volunteer and non-volunteers to evaluate the program's successes and failures.

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