Volunteering to Give up Privilege? How Affluent Youth Volunteers Respond to Class Privilege

Abstract

Although affluent youth can meet people from different social classes and learn about poverty while volunteering, some youth leave volunteer experiences without challenging their class privilege. Using in-depth interviews with forty affluent youth volunteers, the author identifies four ways that youth exercised agency in response to class privilege: evading class, employing equalizing discourses, blaming cultural capital, and challenging class privilege. Because these four strategies both resemble and diverge from strategies used to respond to white privilege, the author argues that discursive responses to privilege are not universal and vary according to the type of privilege being consolidated or challenged. Although positive cross-class interactions were necessary, they were not sufficient to spur youth to challenge class privilege. Youth were more likely to challenge class privilege when they volunteered for long periods of time and completed trainings that identified structural causes of poverty.