This dissertation investigates the Dutch policy turn towards more volunteering in neighborhood-based welfare services, and its effects on poorer and wealthier urban neighbourhoods. Over the last two decades, various Western European governments have become more attentive and supportive to citizens’ voluntary organisations in the fields of social cohesion, care and emancipation in the neighbourhood. In the UK, the so-called ‘Big Society’ policy frame has become very influential. Inspired by this example, the Dutch national government has expressed that the Dutch welfare state is to transform into a ‘participation society’. The dissertation project empirically tests one of the critiques on the Dutch participation society. This critique holds that deprived urban areas have less potential to self-organize welfare services and that, consequently, the level and quality of welfare services will be lower in these neighborhoods than in richer neighborhoods. Therefore it is feared that more support for welfare self-organisation will eventually exacerbate existing social inequality in the city. The research has consisted of interviews and observations of almost all year-round welfare service providing volunteer groups in four Rotterdam neighbourhoods. This showed that the groups are actually more numerous in the poorer than in the wealthier research neighbourhoods: the deprived areas have twice as many groups. Analysis of all 2014 funding applications to the Rotterdam Resident Initiative fund, also shows that deprived boroughs have more groups than wealthier boroughs. To understand deprived neighbourhoods’ higher number of groups per inhabitant, it proves necessary to look also at self-organization leaders’ motivations for volunteering. My interview data indicate that for many higher educated leaders, volunteering is related to paid work. In the second place, higher educated leaders working in low-income neighbourhoods are quite often ethnic minority volunteers who work to help their own ethnic group. Thirdly, I found that ...