A Workable Psycho-Volunteer Platform
Where does the project come from?
The
rapid economic growth in mainland China brings with it not only the fast pace
of urbanization and improvement of living standard of Chinese people but also
problems requiring attention from both government and the whole society. One
such problem, to be more specific, is the psychological health of “empty nest
elderly” who are left home alone by their children who go to work in big
cities. This attracts the attention of a non-government organization
specializing in volunteering organization for senior citizens. This
organization eventually finds its way to offer help in this regard: to
collaborate with the psychological departments of several universities to offer
psychological assistance and intervention. To facilitate this progress, an
online platform is developed to enable proper match between students and the
elderly.
General background of entities
It
would be helpful to know some details of the collaborating parties in order to
understand the extent of synergy which can be achieve. The non-government
non-profit organization is named Senior Citizen Caring Center (abbreviated as
SCCC) while the other side of collaboration involves several parties. They are
psychological departments of several renowned universities. More details of background
information are given as below.
SCCC,
established in 2000 and located in Beijing, specializes in organizing
volunteers to provide various services to senior citizens in the urban area of
Beijing. It has stable number of volunteers from all works of life and can
cover most areas of service except some requiring quite special and extended
knowledge, such as legal and psychological disciplines.
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The
psychological department of university, on the other side, has a great number
of students in their 3rd or 4th year of college or at the
graduate stage. They are longing for opportunities to practice the mastered
concepts and principles but are found rarely accepted as interns by
professional psychological companies due to lack of practical experience. 
Formation of the
virtual platform
The
problem of lacking professional volunteers in psychological discipline becomes
more evident in year 2012 when SCCC started organizing volunteers to go to
rural districts surrounding Beijing where there are a lot of empty-nest elderly
whose children are away from them for most of the time in a year. It found that
most of these old people have psychological problems to a certain degree and
some are at serious level. Therefore, on a psychological forum, the
Secretary-General of SCCC took the initiative to approach some deans of
psychology faculties, and after exchange of each other’s problems and some
preliminary discussion, they decided to initiate a program with an online
platform to solve each other’s challenges.
The virtual platform
The
online platform is a website named “www.hafee.org” and a virtual community for gathering
professional volunteers in psychological discipline to help major symptoms of
old people with psychological problems online. The name “HAFEE” stands for
Holistic Aids for Empty-nest Elders which has a broader room for long-run
development with more comprehensive aids. The design concept of
the platform is that SCCC provides major symptoms of old people with psychological problems
online,
while the universities motivate students from psychological department in an offline manner to apply for volunteer positions online
through this website. Then SCCC can conduct review, selection and orientation for those applicants offline, too. Major functions of the virtual platform
are shown as follows:
- Online Album
As it is a virtual community, the website provided Online Album to share happiness of helping elders. Community member are free to create their own Albums. They can choose those pictures / photos that they want to share and upload to the Online Album. With the support of this Online Album, this can improve the sense of belonging of community members.
- Instant message
Instant message function allows members to add / invite other members to become friends. Once members add a friend on their friend list, he /she can see their friend on the website or not and can chat with their as well. The Instant Message function also supports chat room function. Community member can create chat room for those friends who online. With this function, this can keep member stay at the website and bring more people to this website as well.
- Forum section
Online forum provide a platform where community members can share volunteering stories and experiences. SCCC can provide information for latest activities, show latest Elders cases to student to attract them to apply for volunteer works. Professional from Department of Psychology of universities can provide psychological theories to help student to solve their cases. The form will keep track of those hottest keywords and topics. Those hottest keywords and topics will be shown on the index pages of the forum. So community member can view that hottest topic more easily. The forum divided community members into various user groups. Only those high ranking community members can access those psychological theories from Department of Psychology. Community members can upgrade their user group level by sharing more volunteering stories and invite more friends to join the community.Names of top ten volunteers with the highest points will be shown on the main page as well.
- Data mining function
SCCC staff based on IT Company excels templates to upload elder’s cases to the community platform. All information on cases should be in general, like name and address should not be included in the case. So client’s privacy can be maintained. Once the cases were uploaded, the cases will be classified into difference categories, like difference age range, difference living area, difference types of psychological symptoms. Also from the student side, once they applied for community member, all information stored in the community database will classified into difference categories as well. Based on those two set of information, the data mining function can help to automatically match up students and elder which helps to reduce SCCC staff effort to pair up students. Furthermore, with the growth of community, the database will become more informative, psychological departments from universities can use those information to perform academic analysis.
How does virtual organizing add value to each party?
How
to understand this? The special volunteers are working for SCCC to provide
psychological counseling service to senior people as “independent contractors”
but without payment, a special type of contracting you may assume. In this
sense, they can be regarded as an outsourced unit or “special business process”
which SCCC obtains to fulfill its own value-adding delivery to the society,
while the volunteers themselves gain the valuable practical experience from
this cooperation. Therefore, the interdependence between SCCC and the group of psychological volunteers (the tangible human
In
addition, the collaboration between these two communities also shows the
leverage of professional knowledge through the specific website. The adoption
of IT networks enables SCCC to reach a boarder professional community and speed
up the process of information exchange through posting psychological symptoms
online and the online application function for volunteer recruiting. Professors
from these universities as well as the alumina practitioners are also invited
to web communities to post their opinions, comments and knowledge sharing so as
to enrich the expertise of students. This in return helps to improve the
quality of psychological counseling service that students will provide
eventually, whereas those professors may find interesting topics or proofs for
their research and the practitioners may find business opportunities. The
interaction among the partners and the interdependence on each other reinforce the
value of knowledge leverage in the form of virtual organizing. It’s like a
special large team with team members all having complementary skills and dependent
on each other if the common objective or goals is to be attained2. Sustainability of the platform and community
Although
we think that the collaboration between SCCC and psychological departments of
universities adds value to all parties involved, we have to consider the funding
of the operation and the sustainability of the community which we will foster.
Funding
will be difficult since we know that SCCC and universities are all non-profit
public service entities. However, SCCC has its own official website mainly for
purpose of donation marketing, thus this psychological volunteer platform can
be designed as a sub-site to lower part of operation cost. Besides SCCC can
also allocate a specific fund while the universities can jointly set up a “Senior
Citizen Research Fund” which can contribute to afford part of operation cost as
well. With all above measures, we believe that the platform will be feasible to
sustain.
Another
concern is how to encourage and foster an organic community on this website so
as to realize the true value of the platform. To initiate the collaboration
program successfully, some awareness building promotion activities will be
necessary, such as display of advertising banners on the official websites of
all university partners and SCCC, email notification, posts under social media
accounts and flyers dissemination in the campus. In addition, students should
also be educated about the benefits of the program through above mentioned
channels, such as, how attending the program may help students apply what
they’ve learnt and test their understanding and new ideas in the real field, a
very import process of the knowledge brokering cycle3.
We
think that above practices are necessary in order to make the plan work;
however, thanks to the prosperity of Chinese economy in recent years and as
well as the rapid development of IT technology, SCCC and universities would
have enough funds and capability to execute the collaboration proposal.
Legal & Regulatory constraints
In China, students need to obtain a national
qualification certificate in psychological counseling before they can provide
such service. However, students who intend to enter this industry have usually
obtained the lowest level of qualification certificate before graduation. To
gain higher level, they need to have 3 years of working experience before they
can apply for valuation examination. This makes the working experience prior to
graduation a very attractive leverage for job opportunity and further advancement.
Except psychotherapy, diagnosis and treatment of mental disorder which are
explicitly regulated out of the business scope of psychological counselor according
to the Mental Health Law of the People’s Republic China, these counselors can provide
many types of psychology-related services, such as crisis intervention,
consultation on problems of everyday life, physical diseases, and other mental
health related to work and family.
Since
the main psychological problems of empty-nest elderlies are loneliness,
anxiety, depression4, student volunteers with the lowest level of
qualification are eligible to provide counseling services.
Conclusion
Reference
- N.Venkatraman, John C. Henderson, Real Strategies for Virtual Organizing, Sloan Management Review, 1998
- Lecture Note of High Performing Team
- Article about Psychological counselors on http://baike.baidu.com/view/28434.htm#3
- Andrew Hargadon & Robert I Shtton, “Builidng Innovation Factory”, Harvard Business Review 2000
- Usual Psychological problems of Empty-nest Elderly http://bjchs.org.cn/html/jingshenweisheng/20130201/35132.html
- Win-Win Negotiation, Expanding the Pie
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