This site is an emergent commons and learning lab: a place to share, play, and experiment with ideas about volunteer engagement.
Ultimately, I hope it helps change the conversation about volunteerism. Too often the narrative about service is sweet and anemic (“look at what those nice volunteers did”) or defaults to logistics and transactions. Instead, I envision a:
- narrative about service that is as generative and compelling as the work volunteers do.
- practice of service that draws on community-centric principles such as reciprocity, interdependence, love, stewardship, right relationship, justice, and co-creation.
- framing of service that understands it as a powerful adaptive tool that brings community together to meet common needs.
To support that vision, I borrow a tactic from the Solutions Journalism Network of complicating the narrative. Journalist Amanda Ripley explains it this way:
“Complicating the narrative means finding and including the details that don’t fit the narrative – on purpose. The idea is to revive complexity in a time of false simplicity.”
Why?
- Because service, volunteers, the agencies that engage volunteers, and the practice of community are complex and diverse. Oversimplifying them diminishes their richness and nuance and meaning.
- Because we need to fully reckon with the light and the often-overlooked shadow of service if we are to realize its potential.
- Because we have an opportunity to come up with more enlivening and equitable answers to the question of how we want to be in community with each other.
Ready to get started? Check out, comment on, and share the blogs below or on the right. Explore the concept of the Commons or the application of developmental theories (All Quadrant Model and Action Logics) to volunteerism. Go down a rabbit hole with my dissertation, which is a deep dive on volunteer value and the application of gift economy principles to volunteer engagement: Making the Invisible Visible: Capturing the Value of Volunteerism in Nonprofit Organizations. Thanks for visiting!
- Volunteer Impact Ripples: Showing How Volunteerism Matters“I have all these volunteer impact ripples. Now what?” Shelli Beck, CVA, Director of Volunteer Services at Lyngblomsten, had invited staff who engage volunteers to identify the “ripples” of impact that volunteers make. Everyone recorded their observations on stickie notes and arranged them on a display board with a picture of ripples. It didn’t take…
- Making the Ask for Volunteer Engagement“You are talking to the choir here.” So said the participant attending a session at the Arizona Summit on Volunteerism and Civic Engagement. Jeff Glebocki (Co-Director of the Initiative on Strategic Volunteer Engagement/ISVE) and I were there to share recommendations from recent research about investment in strategic volunteer engagement. The nonprofit Volunteer Engagement Professional suggested that any…
- Investing in Volunteer Engagement: How One Nonprofit Makes the CaseNonprofits juggle many priorities: delivering programs, raising funds, cultivating awareness and relationships, responding to changing community needs, and building trust with multiple audiences, to name just a few. These tasks tend to fall in separate departments, yet one strategy—when done well—can contribute to each of these areas: investing in volunteer engagement. Southwest Human Development in…
- Advancing Your Mission by Activating Volunteers as AdvocatesI usually rail against our sector’s overreliance on reporting volunteer numbers. Too often, the number of volunteers is used as a proxy for volunteer value. Merely counting volunteers omits their real value: what volunteers achieve. Volunteers typically outnumber staff though. And we are in a time when volunteer numbers could achieve a lot for agencies…
- Strength in Numbers: A Renewed Case for Volunteer EngagementIn the nonprofit world, most of us are never going to achieve our missions with paid staff alone. The need is too big. Budgets are too small. Missions require influencing hearts and minds as much as they entail delivering programs and services. We must find strength in numbers. That is more true than ever, given…