The Impact of Modern Volunteering on Local Community Experiences: The Moderating Role of Volunteering-related Ambivalence

Modern volunteerism has undergone a broad transformation, which has made episodic and online forms stem. This study investigates (a) how traditional, episodic, and online volunteering affect volunteers’ local com-munity experiences – meant as Sense of Community (SoC), Sense of Re-sponsible Togetherness (SoRT), and social generativity – and (b) the moderating role of volunteering-related ambivalence in this. The results show that only traditional volunteering has a positive impact on SoC, while online volunteering harms social generativity. Ambivalence plays a com-plex role: it weakens the positive impact of traditional volunteerism on SoC, yet it reverses and strengthens the effect on social generativity when it comes to online one–making it positive. The theoretical and practical implications of these results are discussed.