Super interesting for UNICEF
Amid aid cuts and regression, it's time to embrace spontaneous volunteerism
Henrik Kjellmo Larsen, The New Humanitarian, January 28, 2026
Summary:
Henrik Kjellmo Larsen argues that humanitarian institutions must recognize spontaneous volunteers as central rather than peripheral actors, particularly as aid budgets contract and formal humanitarianism retreats.
Drawing on his experience coordinating over 700 spontaneous volunteers on Lesvos during the 2015 refugee crisis and a decade of subsequent research, Larsen describes how local and transnational volunteers became first responders when half a million people crossed the Aegean Sea, operating for nine months before large international organizations arrived in force.
He documents how humanitarian institutions typically treat spontaneous volunteers as liabilities rather than resources, excluding them through criminalisation practices, quasi-legal mechanisms, bureaucratic gatekeeping, and sometimes arrests and trials. Larsen identifies a "care and control dichotomy" where institutions prioritize risk management, hierarchy and procedure while spontaneous volunteers act from proximity-based care, with European states deliberately blurring the line between solidarity and criminal smuggling.
He proposes "controlled flexibility"—a light enabling framework that recognizes spontaneous volunteers as legitimate actors, orients them to risks and priorities, and links their work to wider response without crushing their speed and empathy. Larsen notes that spontaneous volunteers fall outside duty of care protections despite equal or greater vulnerability to trauma, and argues this gap reflects whose suffering is acknowledged institutionally.
Quotes:
"Treated as a resource and given clear boundaries, they increase capacity, reduce duplication, and get help to people faster. Amid deep aid cuts that are forcing formal humanitarianism to retrench, spontaneous volunteers will shoulder an even larger share of the response." — Henrik Kjellmo Larsen
"Spontaneous volunteers are not a glitch in the humanitarian system. They are part of it and, together with state actors and international organisations, they continually negotiate their role in meeting acute needs. Yet official preparedness plans act as if they do not exist." — Henrik Kjellmo Larsen
"Excluding and criminalising volunteers flows from the same political calculus that produces pushbacks and externalised borders: when deterrence and control take precedence, acts of solidarity are treated as something to police." — Henrik Kjellmo Larsen
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