“Despite the importance of volunteers, there are remarkably few articles about them in nonprofit journals, sessions at conferences, research colloquia, or workshops. Keynote after keynote fails to mention volunteers. Nonprofit staff have insisted on being seen as professionals to the degree where being un-paid is something we don’t really want to bring up.”
Jan Masaoka, CalNonprofits (full blog at Independent Sector)
I agree and am sharing this website as a place for conversation that might help spark more articles, workshops, and keynotes on volunteerism. My goal is to change the conversation about volunteerism from the current and limiting story to a new narrative that is as generative and powerful as the work volunteers do.
This site began as a class project while pursuing a PhD in Leadership. I eventually went on to write a dissertation about volunteerism. (If you are interested in going down that rabbit hole…Making the Invisible Visible: Capturing the Value of Volunteerism in Nonprofit Organizations.) The website is now evolving as a place to share that dissertation research, the content that didn’t make the cut, lessons learned from other disciplines, and ongoing observations about our field.
The Volunteer Commons is a sandbox of sorts: a place to play and experiment. It can be challenging to share ideas that aren’t fully formed or polished. Yet, I believe that deepening our practice of engaging the community as volunteers has to be a process of co-creation. As such, I welcome your comments (even when they aren’t fully formed or polished yet).
Ready to dive in? Check out the application of developmental theories (All Quadrant Model and Action Logics) or the concept of the Commons to volunteerism.
- Trading Measurement for WitnessingThree years ago, I facilitated a session about capturing volunteer impact in Manhattan. We discussed connecting volunteer contributions to the organization mission. I encouraged the group to think about capturing volunteer impact instead of measuring it since so much of what volunteers offer doesn’t show up in numbers. The participants teamed up to match volunteer…
- Why Volunteering for the Optics is Not a Good LookDirty. Icky. Gross. A colleague who facilitates group volunteering shared a trend she noticed in Summer 2020. Some of the groups calling her began asking for service projects “with a diversity focus”. When pressed for what that meant, most could not offer specifics. One corporate representative replied that he was only the messenger, merely passing…
- Volunteer Purpose: Low-Cost Labor, Value-Added Partners, or More?The scene… A volunteer administrator puts the finishing touches on his budget for the year. He is excited about the ways this funding will enable volunteers to advance the organization’s mission in meaningful ways and support paid staff in engaging those volunteers well. The budget is higher than in past years but still modest compared…
- Reflections on Finding Community and This Year’s Popular BlogsAs the year wraps up, I want to thank you for visiting Volunteer Commons. My word for the year was dare. One way I practiced daring was to get content out of the journals pictured above and into the world. The best part of this daring was finding community at the other end of a…
- Musings from the Sandbox: Right RelationshipI’ve been wanting to write about right relationship for some time. It keeps surfacing in what I am reading and journaling, but I have struggled to sort it out in a blog. It seemed like an appropriate time to remember this blog is a sandbox for experimentation and community conversation. One of the stumbling blocks…