Stockholm City Mission (Stadsmissionen) and its volunteers work year-round to help empower and give a voice to those less fortunate. Photo: Fredrik Sandberg/Scanpix 

Every year dozens of non-profit organizations around the country offer food, presents and Christmas entertainment to many of Sweden’s estimated 17,000 people without a registered address. The events are made possible by the generosity and engagement of an army of volunteers.

Oskar Wallgren is one of them. An environmental consultant, he started volunteering with the homeless at Stockholm City Mission (Stadsmissionen) in 2001. “I feel that I have a very privileged life and have few problems of my own,” he says. “So I have both time and energy to help other people, and it feels meaningful.”

Wallgren has also gained personally from working with the homeless. “Through working at Stadsmissionen I have received an insight into other people’s lives — people I would otherwise never have met.”

A fine line

This Christmas some 340 people will be volunteering at Stockholm City Mission, which last year fed and entertained 1,500 homeless people over three days. Volunteer Tina Blomqvist says people often ask her if she is scared when she works with the homeless.

“I’m never scared of people,” she says. “I’m more scared of not doing anything at all.”

Coming in from the cold, a plate of hot soup and a smile can make a real difference. Photo: Patrick Persson/Scanpix

Blomqvist acknowledges that it could easily be her accepting the food rather than serving it. “It is a fine line between a normal life and their life,” she says.

Björn, a soft-spoken 35-year-old originally from northern Sweden, is one of those who found himself on the wrong side of that line, and he will be accepting a Christmas meal in the city of Malmö this year.

“When you’re homeless it seems like you are either invisible or hated by a lot of normal people,” he says. “But at these Christmas meals with the volunteers, it’s not like that. I get treated like a human being and that makes a big difference for me.”

New way of volunteering

Helping the homeless takes many forms. A typically 21st century effort saw a group on Facebook collect more than 1,000 presents for the homeless in Göteborg last year. A similar initiative is underway this Christmas.

Amelie Silfverstolpe is the founder of Volontärbyrån, a non-profit website where people can find volunteering opportunities. She says studies show that while the number of Swedes volunteering has remained constant over the years, the activities to which they give their time and enthusiasm has changed.

Amelie Silfverstolpe of Voluntärbyrån has noticed different "trends" among volunteers over the years. People give their time to a wider selection of causes than previously and some select their volunteer work based on the actual task performed. Photo: Janerik Henriksson/Scanpix

“Previously, people became members of organizations to raise their voice for a cause like women’s rights or temperance,” she says. “But now people are also volunteering to give service to groups such as children or the elderly or the homeless.

“We also see a new way of volunteering, where people are not looking so much at what the ideology of the organization is, but what they actually do as a volunteer; something they think is fun or that could be valuable on their CV.”

It is sometimes said that Swedes are less likely than the people of other nations to help the less fortunate because of the strong social safety net; people here pay high taxes and consider that to be their contribution to the wider society. But Silfverstolpe thinks this is a myth.

“People in Sweden have long been engaged. It is a long tradition that we call the people’s movement (folkrörelsen), and so maybe they haven’t really considered it as volunteering.”

Kerstin Woodcock, who is retired, has spent many years helping the homeless in Stockholm, shaking collection tins at passers-by and serving pea soup from a mobile kitchen in the city. “I’ll never forget when one of the old guys took me by the hand and said: ‘I love you, because you look so happy,’” she says.

Moving stories

Woodcock remembers being told at school in the 1940s about the homeless people who visited City Mission’s church and the unfortunate turns their lives had taken. “These stories took a hold of me,” she says. Half a century later, she found herself working in the very same church.

“Working as a volunteer is so much fun that you almost feel guilty about it. It makes you so happy. People give life meaning, that’s just how it is.”

(Interviews with volunteers taken with permission from Stockholm City Mission’s magazine Mission)

What are your thoughts on volunteering? Is this your season to be sharing your time with those less fortunate? Feel free to comment below!

David Wiles

British journalist David Wiles is the editor of Sweden Today magazine. He is living and working in the south of Sweden.

The author alone is responsible for the opinions expressed in this article.

Classification: A280EN