Aging, Volunteering, Culture and Community Development: Chinese Immigrant Seniors in a Canadian Volunteer Program


Yidan Zhu, Texas State University

Previous studies on volunteering and community development focus on professional agents and actors in developing volunteering programs for community engagement (Millora, 2023; Brown and Green, 2015), yet, not so many studies focus on immigrant seniors as active actors contribute to the volunteering activities and community development. This paper explores the intersection of community development, cultural capitals, and the volunteering and learning activities of Chinese immigrant seniors in Canada. This paper takes the Community Cultural Wealth (CCW) (Yosso, 2005) as a theoretical framework to understand how Chinese immigrant seniors actively practice volunteering activities and utilize cultural capitals as strategies to navigate into the local society. The CCW theory, developed by Yosso (2005), provides deficit-based models for assessing the success and potential of individuals from historically marginalized communities. The CCW theory identifies six forms of capital that contribute to the success and resilience of individuals, including aspirational capital, navigational capital, social capital, linguistic capital, familial capital, and resistance capital. Adopting the CCW theory, this paper aims to understand how these cultural capitals, including the aspirational, navigational, social, linguistic, familial, and resilience capitals contribute to Chinese immigrant seniors’ volunteering practice in community development. It further helps to understand the challenges and resilience embedded within Chinese immigrant seniors’ volunteering practices and community engagement. The study seeks to examine the dynamics of volunteering within a community context. Drawing insights from semi-structured in-depth interviews with 21 Chinese senior immigrants, the research sheds light on the challenges faced by immigrant seniors in their volunteering activities and explores avenues for providing support to enhance community-based volunteer programs. The research team worked closely with the Chinese Volunteer Association in Canada (CVAC) in Montreal, which is a non-for-profit organization that organized various learning forums and activities, employing platforms such as Zoom courses, public education events, internet articles, a YouTube channel, and WeChat groups. These activities garnered support from numerous organizations and volunteers, spanning academics, educators, service agents, professionals, and policymakers, not only from Canada but also from the United States, United Kingdom, Japan, and China. With the assistance from the CVAC, we recruited 21 participants who participated in the virtual volunteering program and conducted individual interviews with them. To diversify the sample, we adopted a purposive sampling strategy to recruit participants with different age cohorts, roles and responsibilities in the program, etc. The data were analyzed following a grounded theory approach (Corbin and Strauss, 2015). This approach was chosen because of the exploratory nature of this study. A grounded theory analytic approach allowed us to understand the data without pre-existing assumptions (Corbin and Strauss, 2015). Research team members read the transcripts independently and discussed the transcripts and coding strategies. Then, two coders engaged in open coding independently (Corbin and Strauss, 2015) and met regularly to review the codebook. The study highlights language, culture, family and community practices as crucial elements influencing immigrant seniors’ volunteering and learning activities. This paper provides practical insights for organizers and policymakers to create sustainable environments for engaging immigrant seniors in community-based volunteer programs. This paper concludes that understanding the role of culture in volunteering and community development not only contribute to a more deeper understanding of their volunteering dynamics but also offer practical insights for organizers and policymakers to develop culture-related community-based volunteer programs for enhancing immigrant seniors’ practice of volunteer, learning and settlement.

Non-presenting authors: Weijia Tan, University of Toronto; Liuxi Wu, University of Oxford; Jingyi Hou, University of Toronto; Jingjing Yi, University of Toronto; Weiguo Zhang, University of Toronto

This paper will be presented at the following session: