Evaluation of the motivations of non-institutional voluntary activities for immigrants: The case of Ankara volunteers

In Turkey, which has been transformed from a transit and migration country to a migration receiving country in the last decade as a result of the Syrian war and the unstable governance and economic difficulties in the Middle East and North Africa, the state and civil society have assumed a conscientious responsibility with all their stakeholders in solving the humanitarian crisis that has continued to increase especially with the Syrian war. The fact that the migrants from Syria continue their lives far below the minimum living level has mobilized the social conscience in addition to the state and non-governmental organizations in meeting their urgent humanitarian needs, and has created a new non-institutional volunteerism formation by creating migrant awareness in the society. The fact that there are similar sociological organizations in many cities of Turkey, it has been deemed necessary to show the example of this organized and continuous volunteerism movement to the world and to reflect a different version of volunteerism, which is processed in modern non-governmental organizations, in the literature. In this study, the motivations of non-institutional volunteering activities for migrants are evaluated on the basis of Social Exchange, Empowerment and Conflict Theories and Cultural Competence Model on the axis of Volunteering Motivation Inventories. While determining the motivations of the volunteers, the phenomenological research design, one of the qualitative research methods, was used as it was tried to capture a holistic perspective by making in-depth sense of the functioning of their activities, their perspectives on migrants and volunteering. In order to explore the reasons that increase the motivation of volunteers, in-depth interviews with 18 volunteers operating in Ankara, participant observation in the field 30 times and following their social media accounts were used. As a result of the research, it was determined that how volunteers are organized, how they turn into large organized structures, the determinants of religion and empathy in volunteering motivation, the accelerating effect of new media tools on modern volunteering formations, social contact and sense of duty create other responsibility towards immigrants, and volunteers act as a socio-economic and socio-cultural bridge between immigrants and the settled society. Thus, it has been seen that selfless and sustainable volunteering activities carried out without being under an institutional roof, which are ignored in the national and international arena, should be evaluated in socio-economic policies to increase the social welfare of migrants, and in socio-cultural policies that will facilitate the social cohesion of migrants and residents by changing the discriminatory and marginalizing perspective towards migrants.