Analysis

Due to this research pretends to be documentary and descriptive, we used a methodology based on structured interviews that allowed us to comprehend more the volunteering phenomenon in EAFIT University, which includes the identification of the performance of the civic contribution, the greatest gender that offers to volunteer, the degrees of the volunteers, the ages were they are more likely to help, the different volunteering groups, as well as identifying what volunteers think about what is known as volunteering and the benefits they have and give to the society.

The state or the university (depending if it is a private or public university) is providing a support to the academy and in return extracts a high price in terms of the involvement it expects of the academy in order to enhance its new engagement with society, even if is a global society (McILarth and Mac Labhrainn, 2007). In the case of EAFIT University, that support comes from the academy itself with the contribution to all these groups trough the freedom to express themselves, the infrastructure so they can have a localized core, the proper implements, permissions and all necessary approval to operate.

In this way, EAFIT is working hard to accomplish what their social responsibility declaration is taken into account in their vision statement, but that at the same time is not proclaimed in their mission statement starts saying " EAFIT University has the mission of contributing to the social, economic, scientific and cultural progress of the country trough the development of degrees and post graduate programs..."(EAFIT, 2009). At the time they advocate the need or the importance about social engagement they are not attributing the importance they may have or at least they are not considering them as a turning point where those volunteering groups benefit the university as be considered a civic university.

And the concept of civic engagement in higher education, encompasses a wide range of approaches to develop the civic kills, interests and participation of students, staff and institutional management. Examples include community based learning (or service learning), volunteering, community focused research, participative and collaborative research and educational initiatives, etc. (Gonzalez and McILarth and Mac Labhrainn, 2007)

There is a awareness of the potential of High education institutions to impact on their communities with many examples in the literature (Al-Kodman, 1999; Allen-Meares, 2005; Atman, 1995; Amey et al, 2002; Arbuckle & De hoog, 2004; Barnett, 1993; Percy et al, 2006) that highlight models for addressing social issues through collaboration. A number of authors suggest that this marks a return of universities towards their original purpose and will have positive repercussions for both universities and communities (Aronson & Webster, 2007; Buys & Burnall, 2007; Checkoway, 2001; Chibucos & Lerner, 1999)

The study that we made at EAFIT University support this trend not in the return of the univeristies towards their original purpose, but to help the society. The volunteering groups in this university have been increasing since 1960 that according to the information gathered is the first volunteering that started with this concern, sponsored by its international core, and since then all the groups were born, mostly since 1980 to 2005, what shows a boom, a social and civic contribution awareness as is shown in figure ( )












Gender in volunteering


Is commonly to find that in gender, women have higher rates of participation in volunteering groups (MacPhail and Bowles, 2008;

when analyzing the amount of students of the total that EAFIT has that belongs to volunteer, we surprisingly found that

When analyzing the amount of students of the total that EAFIT has that belongs to volunteer, we surprisingly found that only 443 students from EAFIT belong to a volunteering group inside the campus, this means that only the 6% of all the students are worried about that social/civic engagement, that percentage is a very low taking into accounts others countries statistics.
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in terms of degrees, we divided in the four schools -not in careers- that the university has: Business School (that includes: Business Administration, International Business, Economy and Accountability), Engineering School (includes: Production, Mechanic, Process, Product design, Civil, Systems and Geology), Law School (include: Law) and Social Sciences (includes: Music, Social Communication, Politics, Physics Engineering and Mathematics Engineering). In the first place we found Business with 51% of volunteers that belong to this school, in second place we have Engineering and in third and fourth place respectively are Law and Social Sciences School.

Leadership

All the groups demonstrated to work together no matter their degrees, ages or levels in their organizational structure, they all work in different projects depending their responsibility level. In many cases no matter if the members were not part of the board of directors, they were able to give their opinions in order to contribute and been heard. This seemed to have a number of important benefits including giving ownership of the work to less senior volunteers, being able to act in the absence of the leader and freeing up the time to the leader to work on more strategic issues (Ockenden and Hutin, 2008).