Helle Hygum Espersen

Areas of work

Helle works with civil society, volunteering, and cross-sector collaboration between civil society and the public sector.

She works both with population surveys on voluntary engagement among Danes and with qualitative studies of how civil society and volunteering unfold in practice. This includes studies of associations and organizations, national infrastructure organizations that support voluntary work, as well as studies of new informal forms of organization and different types of voluntary engagement—both continuous, membership-based forms and looser, more informal types of volunteering. Helle focuses, among other things, on how spaces for voluntary participation develop and what this means for democracy.

Helle also works with cross-sector collaboration between the public sector and civil society. She studies individual partnerships between municipalities and civil society, which take place both among citizens, volunteers, and professionals, and as organizational practices. She works with both local and national forms of collaboration and examines what these collaborations entail at different levels, including how they affect culture, governance, and identity in both civil society and the public sector. She is particularly interested in how collaboration between civil society and the public sector can address challenges related to democracy, the economy, and complex, multifaceted issues. Helle’s PhD thesis focused on how different categories of civil society organizations participate in co-creation arenas with municipalities.

Helle works across sectors and with diverse target groups, including older adults, young people, adults, the labor market, the health and social sectors, and the education sector.

She is a frequently invited speaker and gives lectures on civil society and cross-sector collaboration (co-creation, co-production, and partnerships), as well as active citizen participation in municipalities, for audiences including municipalities, ministries, civil society organizations, trade unions, and educational institutions.

In recent years, Helle Hygum Espersen has also taught courses on cross-sector collaboration and civil society at institutions including Roskilde University (RUC), Copenhagen Business School (CBS), the University of Copenhagen (KU), and University College Copenhagen. She also serves as an external examiner at several universities.

Methods

Helle primarily works with qualitative studies and conducts interviews, observations, and focus groups, which often include workshops with practitioners who receive professional input throughout the process while also contributing data to the studies are also included as data in the studies.

She also conducts literature reviews.

In addition, Helle works with quantitative population surveys on volunteering in Denmark.

Background

Helle holds a PhD from Roskilde University, a Master’s degree in Social Entrepreneurship, also from Roskilde University, and a Master’s degree in Comparative Literature from the University of Copenhagen.
Before joining VIVE (formerly KORA) in 2014, she worked with civil society collaboration in the City of Copenhagen and social housing initiatives at KAB, conducted interviews at a market research institute, and wrote literary reviews for the press.