Synthesis

• Through an analysis of quantitative survey data grounded in the experiences of 3,053 young refugees in Uganda, this paper captures the articulations of volunteering with place, subjectivities, and inequalities amongst refugee groups. This is particularly important given the growing prevalence of volunteering in policy‐making for humanitarian and development interventions, and a perceived need to further understand the scale of individuals' experiences of and rewards from volunteering and how this affects livelihoods, especially amongst displaced populations in the global South.
• The data provides new evidence of who these volunteers are, beyond their refugee status, why, where and how they conduct their activities, and reveals how these are connected to livelihoods and community development. 
• Through this survey analysis, the paper argues for the need to establish grounded conceptualizations of volunteering that consider the scales, distribution, and various forms of volunteering within specific groups.
• In doing so, the paper offers a new framework for better understanding the relationships between volunteering and refugee lives through four interlocking factors: place, (im)mobility, income and gender. 
• It highlights how dominant conceptual framings and methodologies often do not account for—or help us understand—volunteering in the contexts of lives that might fall outside of the demographics and geographies that have shaped much of the literature to date. 
• The analysis suggests that geographies of volunteering need to be much more firmly located in volunteers' specific spaces and moments of everyday life, particularly in the context of displacement. This approach applies to quantitative research as well as qualitative, ensuring that its conceptualization respects diverse histories and experiences of volunteering, better capturing the global diversity of volunteer experiences in academic and policy debates.