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Several interrelated concerns, of policy importance and academic interest, prompt a focus on the volunteer activity of persons with disabilities. First, there has been a rapid growth in the number of persons who collect disability benefits from public programs and a decline in employment of persons with disabilities [e.g., Bound and Waidmann (2002) and Burkhauser Houtenville and Wittenburg (2003) in the U.S. and Campolieti and Lavis (2000) in Canada]. Second, engaging persons with disabilities in active employment is now regarded as important not only to reduce the numbers on income support but also to foster their integration into society. Not surprisingly increased attention has recently been paid to various policy initiatives that facilitate the labour force participation of persons with disabilities. Such initiatives include: reducing the work disincentives embedded in the various income support programs; reducing the barriers to returning to work through reasonable accommodation requirements on employers; facilitating the adaptation of disabled workers to their limitations (e.g., changing jobs, changing employers, changing the kind of work they do and how much work they do); reducing the effect of the disability through vocational rehabilitation; and improving the ability of the disabled to re-enter the labour market by providing additional education as well as job' search assistance.
A neglected area--and the focus of this analysis--is volunteer activity for the disabled, both as a potential bridge to employment and as an activity that fosters their integration into society. The usefulness of volunteer activity as a bridge to paid employment has already been emphasized, given the substantial monetary return to time spent volunteering--6 to 7 per cent estimated by Day and Devlin (1998) and 4 per cent in Devlin (2001). Volunteering may also form a bridge to a deeper engagement in the workforce for many groups who normally have problems with transitions into the labour force such as youths (school-to-work transition), older workers (transition to retirement), and women and the unemployed (transition back to the labour market) [for example, among others, Gomez and Gunderson (2001,2003) and Jones (1999, 2000)]. The potential for volunteer activity to provide a bridge to paid employment is exhibited by the fact that the U.S. Civil Service Commission and a number of federal agencies regard volunteer activity as the equivalent of time spent in paid employment in terms of giving credit for work experience (Dicken and Blomberg, 1988). Canadian survey evidence indicates that 71 per cent of employers encourage or accommodate employee volunteer activity during working hours and/or encourage employees to volunteer on their own time. The most common reasons employers gave for such support were to improve their public image, to improve employee morale and to improve relations with the surrounding community (Easwaramoorthy eta/., 2006). Some private sector employers, such as Delta Airlines, have also used volunteer activity as a transitional activity in their return-to-work strategy for injured employees who are well enough to do volunteer work but not yet well enough to return to their regular job (USA Today, September 1, 1999, 3B). Volunteer activity also fits into the broad initiatives currently underway in Canada and the U.S., which are trying to increase the likelihood that persons with disabilities who are collecting disability benefits would leave the disability rolls and re-enter the labour market. In spite of its obvious policy and practical importance, to our knowledge, the volunteer activity of persons with disabilities (to facilitate transitions back to work) has not been systematically analyzed.
A small number of Canadian empirical studies have analyzed the determinants of volunteering in general and for particular groups, and their conclusions will be contrasted with ours for persons with disabilities. Vaillan court (1994) and Day and Devlin (1996) use the 1987 Survey of Volunteering (VAT), and Hall etal. (1998, 2001 ) use the 1997 and 2000 National Survey of Giving, Volunteering and Participating (NSGVP), respectively, but provide only cross-tabulations that do not control for the influence of other factors. Devlin (2001) also uses the 1997 survey but focuses on the impact of volunteering on earnings, with only passing reference to the determinants of the decision to volunteer. Gomez and Gunderson (2003) use the General Social Survey of 1994, but focus on characteristics of work and family as influencing volunteer activity; they have no information on persons with disabilities or income support programs. Other studies deal only with particular subgroups--youths (Jones, 2000), seniors (Jones, 1999) and the unemployed (Gomez and Gunderson, 2001). None of these studies, however, analyze the volunteer activity of persons with disabilities. To our knowledge this is also the case with U.S. studies.
This paper proposes to fill the gap in the literature by using Statistics Canada's Participation and Activity Limitation Survey (PALS), a unique dataset that focuses exclusively on disabled individuals with activity limitations and that has measures of voluntary activity as well as information on demographics, educational attainment, income and household characteristics. Most importantly, PALS also contains information on income support programs that provide some income to persons with disabilities. The rules governing the receipt of benefits in these programs can alter an individual's incentives to volunteer.
We look at the volunteer activity of persons with disabilities principally (though not exclusively) from an economic perspective--interpreting our estimates through the social capital and household production frameworks. This paper is the first study to: (1) identify the disincentives/incentives to volunteer activity embodied in various income support programs for the disabled; and (2) to estimate whether these incentives/disincentives are in fact associated with differences in the propensity for disabled individuals to engage in volunteer activity.
Disability Policy in Canada and Incentives to Volunteer Embedded in Income Support Programs
The last several decades have seen a gradual shift from passive income support in terms of public programs for persons with disabilities, to an increased emphasis on enabling their reintegration into the labour market. In the United States, the primary focus of these efforts has been the American with Disabilities Act (ADA), which implemented comprehensive barrier removal legislation by requiring reasonable accommodation requirements on employers. In Canada, there has been much less emphasis on barrier removal legislation. In contrast, Canadian efforts that have tried to assist the re-entry of persons with disabilities into the labour market have primarily occurred via the Employment Assistance for People with Disabilities program and the "In Unison" agreements with the provincial social assistance ministries (Campolieti and Lavis, 2000), which have been recently replaced by the Multilateral Framework for Labour Market Agreements for Persons with Disabilities. These programs provide job search assistance as well as education and other services that help persons with disabilities become better prepared for a re-entry into the labour market. In addition, these programs also try to encourage employers to consider disabled workers for employment.
Canada has a wide range of benefit or income support programs that persons with disabilities can access. They can create various (likely unintended) disincentives to the use of volunteering as a way of "testing the waters" to form a bridge for persons with disabilities to engage in active paid employment. The disincentives generally arise from three factors: the scrutiny that program administrators apply for the recipient to maintain their eligibility for benefits; the extent to which volunteering could jeopardize those benefits; and the magnitude of the loss of benefits if they are jeopardized by volunteering. While such dimensions are difficult to precisely delin eate, the programs can be grouped according to the extent to which they may deter volunteer activity.
Workers' compensation programs are a provincial responsibility (the legislation that governs them varies across provinces) that are concerned with insuring workers with disabilities and industrial diseases that arose in or during the course of employment. One of the principal goals of workers' compensation programs is the return of the injured worker to paid employment. Consequently, workers' compensation scrutinizes its recipients with respect to their ability to return to work. In many cases, they may be expected to return to "light duties" once they have reached the point of maximum medical improvement. In such circumstances volunteering could be interpreted as being able to return to light duties and hence jeopardize continued receipt of benefits. Since persons on workers' compensation were once employed, their potential employability itself is not questionable except for their residual level disability after they reach the point of maximum medical improvement. Consequently, for workers with more severe injuries, engaging in volunteer work prior to reaching the point of maximum medical improvement could result in the termination of benefits. As a result, the disincentive to volunteer can be quite substantial for persons collecting workers' compensation benefits.
In contrast, the Canada/Quebec Pension Plan Disability (C/QPP-D) program specifically allows persons with disabilities the option of taking on volunteer work without any threat of reducing the size of their disability pensions. The fact that volunteering is specifically mentioned as acceptable suggests that it is encouraged as a prelude to facilitate a more formal re-entry to the labour market or as a way for persons with disabilities to maintain an attachment with the world of work, after formal exit from the labour force has occurred.
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