ISTR Fourth International Conference Dublin, Ireland / July 5-8, 2000 The Third Sector: For What and For Whom?

M. Brunetti
B. Moreschi
N. Zamaro

The paper will present some of the results from Istat second survey on voluntary organizations, focusing on the relationship between their structures and the activities they perform.

In 1997, in Italy, there were almost 12 thousand voluntary organizations. The majority of them (59.9%) work in the North of the country, although, compared to the former survey (referred to 1995), the number of organizations operating in Southern regions is rising.

Besides territorial differences there are also structural differences among organizations: about 50 percent are members of larger groups, a third are federated and most (49.7%) work with a very little number of volunteers (less than twenty).

On the other hand, Italian voluntary organizations have not a big economic size, since about 50 percent have an income of less than 20 million lire (10,329 euro).

Volunteers operating within these organizations are almost 6 hundred thousand and the majority are men (57.4%). Involvement of volunteers is concentrated in their middle ages (45.1% of the volunteers are between 30 and 54), most are employed people (48.2%) and their level of education is not very high (only 11% of the volunteers have a university degree).

Most of the Italian voluntary organizations operate in Health (37.6%) and Social Protection (28.7%), while the others work in sectors like Recreation Activities, Emergency and Relief, Environment, Education, Advocacy, Sport Activities and Culture. About 60 percent of the voluntary organizations operate only in one sector of activities and the two thirds offer more than one social service to their clients.

Organizations which directly take care of people are about 50% of the entire population. They take care of about 2,500,000 people (the majority of whom are sick people) and tend to be specialized on offering their services to only one target group.

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