The community sector survives on unpaid labour, goodwill, and volunteering, writes Shelley Loader. Photo / 123rf
Straight after university, I was interviewed by a panel for a psychologist role.
I felt the dismissal as soon as I walked in and was eventually told I was too young and lacked life experience.
At the time, I felt frustrated. My CV made my age clear and, after four years at university, I was eager to start earning.
What was the point of a degree I couldn’t use?
Looking back, they were right. Academic knowledge alone hadn’t prepared me for the complexity of real people’s lives.
I have since learnt that empathy, humility and experience are as valuable as formal qualifications, if not more so.
Those drawn to community work often arrive with a deep emotional connection to the issues we confront.
Many of us have survived the very challenges we now help others navigate.
That personal history builds empathy and trust, giving credibility where credentials alone can’t, but it can also blur boundaries.
When work mirrors life, burnout creeps in unless support is deliberate and sustained.
Others gain insight through immersion, seeing inequality and hardship up close.
Proximity reshapes our values and creates a shared sense of responsibility to act.
Community work often feels like a calling rather than a job. We overextend because we care.
Underfunded organisations too often rely on that care, unable to support fair pay and manageable workloads.
The sector survives on unpaid labour, goodwill and volunteering.
Decision-makers rely on it to fill funding gaps and balance the books, masking systemic neglect.
Short-term, competitive funding structures prioritise projects over sustainability, treating passion and sacrifice as infinite resources.
The professionalism paradox runs deep.
Despite demonstrating high competence and collaboration, community workers are often seen as less professional than their government or corporate equivalents.
Traditional professionalism prizes hierarchy and detachment, while ours depends on empathy, collaboration and trust.
Accountability lies not only with policy and efficiency, but with people and place.
These relational skills are often dismissed as “soft”, yet they hold communities together and prevent crises before they escalate.
This undervaluing has gendered roots. Community work, like teaching and nursing, is linked to care and compassion, traits historically coded as feminine and therefore devalued.
Ironically, this also harms men who choose caring roles, reinforcing hierarchies that devalue empathy itself.
The result is a system that penalises those who prioritise care over status.
Yet community workers consistently demonstrate strong ethics, reflection and commitment to collective wellbeing.
The sector isn’t less professional, rather differently professional, grounded in ethics, relationships and collaboration.
Social historian E.P. Thompson described a “moral economy” of systems sustained by ethics and trust as much as money.
Community work is a living example. Relationships and reputation act as social currency.
Decisions are often guided by what feels right, not merely profitable or efficient.
But when goodwill becomes expectation, morality subsidises austerity.
The sector’s ethical strength can also be its weakness.
Valuing lived experience must go beyond symbolic recognition.
It means equal pay, authority and decision-making power.
True equity treats emotional and experiential knowledge as professional capital, supported by sustainable funding rather than exploited passion.
This reliance on goodwill reflects how governments shift responsibility outward, depending on communities to hold themselves together while systemic inequities remain unaddressed.
True equity requires valuing emotional and experiential knowledge alongside academic and bureaucratic forms, not reducing one to fit the other.
Community workers operate in spaces where housing, trauma, health, education and justice intersect.
This demands systems thinking, emotional regulation and critical reflection, competencies that are invisible in most performance frameworks.
The public often sees helpers, not the applied systems thinkers preventing crises before they happen.
The most effective, preventative work is often the least visible and least funded.
Short-term funding keeps organisations competing instead of collaborating, creating flexibility for policymakers but precarity for workers.
Many community professionals are already marginalised, and our emotional resilience becomes both our strength and the system’s unacknowledged safety net.
In doing the work of justice for others, we must navigate inequity both personally and professionally.
Philosopher Miranda Fricker calls the devaluing of certain people’s knowledge, experiences or ways of understanding the world “epistemic injustice”.
When lived experience is dismissed as anecdotal, it shapes who is heard, whose expertise counts, and where resources flow.
Those who best understand communities are often least listened to.
Equity requires redistributing not just money, but voice and authority.
Only when lived experience holds real decision-making power will the system begin to reflect the people it serves.
Relational ways of working, such as collective impact, co-design and community-led development, now influence mainstream policy.
The sector continually redefines leadership, power and participation.
Collaboration and care are not soft skills but forms of social technology essential to solving complex problems.
At the heart of community work lies hope.
Not naive optimism, but strategic endurance in the face of inequality and the refusal to give in to cynicism when change is slow.
True hope is collective, growing through shared purpose and mutual care.
Yet when institutions demand constant optimism, hope can become unpaid emotional labour.
When professionalism is required regardless of circumstance, it slips into toxic positivity, the pressure to appear resilient even when conditions are unjust.
It disguises systemic failure as personal failure.
True sustainability requires fair conditions, not forced resilience.
Hope remains essential to positive social change. It motivates action, sparks creative problem-solving, and sustains collective movements through setbacks.
Community workers, in this sense, are practitioners of collective hope and one of society’s most undervalued yet vital functions.
Immersion in community teaches us that life experience isn’t just about years lived or experiences had, but the capacity to connect, reflect, and understand others.
That insight is the foundation of true professionalism. It’s about perspective.
We see it all, and that is our power.
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