Solidarity Projects in Norwegian Schools: Students' Motivation and School Leaders' Rationale

Abstract Each year thousands of Norwegian students spend one day of their education to collect money for different aid projects. These projects aim at giving youth in developing countries the opportunity to education and are referred to as Solidarity Projects. The projects are organized by different NGO s. The first organizations that started offering solidarity projects were Operation Day´s Work. This organization was founded in 1964, and is run for, by and with youth. Participation in solidarity projects are based on volunteerism. There is a strong focus on that students should participate out of solidarity, not because the feel sorry for the students in a developing context or because the feel guilty. ODW is still the main contributor of solidarity projects in Norwegian context with over 120 000 participating students each year. The later years there has, however, been a decrease in the number of participation schools doing ODW. There may be many possible reasons for this decrease. One of the main reasons is that other NGOs like e.g. PLAN Norge, Hei Verden! and other organizations offers schools to make their cause into a solidarity project. In addition, some schools choose to develop their own solidarity projects by collaborating with a local NGO in a developing context or a single school in an area. The findings this study is based on are collected through qualitative interviews with students and school leaders at four different schools in Oslo. Two of the schools participated in ODW s project, while two schools collaborated with other organizations for their solidarity project. The purpose of the interviews was to find out about student motivation and school rationale for participation in solidarity projects. The study applies The Volunteer Function Inventory (Clary et al, 1998) as a framework to analyze the student motivation. Motivation is compared between the different types of projects as well as across school level. In addition school leaders justifications for participation are compared