Volunteer Service in Promoting Community Resilience Governance: Practical Reflections and Pathways for Optimization

Abstract

The key to community resilience governance lies in activating endogenous forces and fostering sustainable local participation. Taking the physical renovation of an old residential compound as a practical context, and drawing on a comprehensive questionnaire survey alongside an in-depth compound case study, this paper systematically analyzes the critical bottlenecks in post-renovation governance. These challenges include property-operation losses, blocked communication channels for residents' demands, significant shortages of age-friendly services, and generally weak self-governance capacities among community members. To address these multifaceted issues, this study proposes an innovative "volunteering + property management" co-governance framework. This framework is structured on five-actor collaboration and is intricately linked by the full-cycle embedding of volunteer service throughout the community lifecycle. Furthermore, the research distills actionable implementation paths to ensure the framework's long-term success, specifically focusing on Party-building leadership, curriculum support for volunteers, project-based operational models, and incentive compatibility mechanisms. By integrating these strategic elements, the proposed approach provides a robust theoretical and practical reference for similar residential compounds. Ultimately, this study offers a viable roadmap for communities to successfully transition from merely being "renovated well" to being sustainably "managed well," thereby enhancing overall urban resilience, improving living standards, and strengthening social cohesion and overall well-being in modern cities.