What influences where volunteers practice environmental stewardship? The role of scale(s) in sorting stewards

Environmental stewardship (ES) typically occurs at nonprofit organizations through stewardship programs. Organizations may have limited capacity to understand what motivates volunteers, which limits recruitment and sustainment. Using a community geography approach, we propose that stewards self-sort and mobilize based on how an organization’s scale of operation matches the scale of stewards’ motivations. We test this in a comparative research design wherein volunteers at two disparate partner organizations were surveyed (n = 341). After collapsing those motivations via exploratory factor analysis, a nominal logistic regression model predicted each volunteer’s organizational affiliation as a function of their motivations. The results reinforce a “First Law of Environmental Stewardship”, which states that all stewards share certain overarching motivations; but motivations are more alike within organizations than between organizations. The close correspondence between motivational and organizational scales suggests that nonprofits seeking to broaden their volunteer pools can experiment with multiscalar programming, combining immediate, place-based actions alongside movement-building.