Finding the Whole among the Pieces

This summer, I started learning to make mosaics. The raw materials are intriguing: glass tiles, small stones, scraps of the broken and discarded. Creating a mosaic is an exercise in taking overlooked bits and bobs and finding the whole among the pieces.

I can’t help seeing a parallel to volunteer engagement (of course). For many reasons, we break volunteerism into ever smaller parts. We take big projects and parse them into smaller tasks that can be completed in a few hours. We take rich volunteer contributions and carve them into numbers of hours and a financial value of service.

Splitting things into smaller parts is not a problem if we can keep sight of the whole, but too often, the whole is exactly what is lost. We forget to tell volunteers how their four-hour shift connects to the mission or supports the community. We count volunteer time and don’t talk about the results of that time. We price volunteer value and omit the non-financial and intangible worth that volunteers offer.

Perhaps it is not surprising then that volunteerism and volunteer engagement are undervalued in so many agencies. We divvied up service and left it in a fragmented state: numbers in a spreadsheet or statistics in an annual report. It’s the equivalent of sorting mosaic pieces into similar shapes and colors. Sure, the pieces are organized, but no pattern or picture is visible.

When we divide volunteerism, the connections between volunteer time and agency mission are difficult to detect. It is nearly impossible to make meaning of volunteer efforts.

Volunteer Engagement Professionals as Interpreters

Finding and helping others see the whole is no small task. I love the way that Gemma Brown, Strategic Lead for Volunteering at The Prince’s Trust, framed this work in a conversation we had this year. She said that Volunteer Engagement Professionals (VEPs) are interpreters.

Exactly! VEPs arrange the mosaic pieces of volunteer projects and roles into a shape. They fill in the spaces around the shape to help link seemingly disparate bits into a meaningful whole. They draw attention to the final piece and help volunteers, co-workers, and the community see the big picture of service.

Mission and Values as Guides

The good news is that we already have a sketch of the meaningful whole for the organization: the mission and values. The task then is to arrange volunteer roles and statistics in a way that reflects them, even if we do not collect new data.

Let’s say that we are already tracking volunteer numbers and hours. For example, 20 garden volunteers donate 400 hours of their time in one year. That does not say much unless we connect their work to the mission. For a community garden, the volunteers might welcome, train, and support other gardeners who want to grow their own food or cut their own bouquets. At a hospital garden, the volunteers might sustain a place of beauty and respite for patients and families. For a school garden, they may teach students about where fruits and veggies come from or how ecosystems work – and keep everything growing on school breaks.

We can go a step further by connecting volunteer work to agency values. The community garden volunteers help neighbors grow their knowledge of organic techniques and their connections to each other. The hospital gardeners contribute to a healing environment. The school garden volunteers make learning relevant and get kids excited about the world around them.

Interpretation helps others understand what makes particular volunteers and their specific time and talents special to the agency’s mission. It transforms a list of numbers without context into something meaningful.

From Reporting to Meaning Making

Interpretation also provides direction into creative forms of reporting about volunteers. In the community garden example, volunteers are cultivating relationships with plants and soil and neighbors. Their success might look like the kinds of food or plants grown, how people put their gardens to use for themselves or others, or how many gardeners made connections with other neighbors or learned a new skill.

These outputs and outcomes can be shared in stories, quotes, photos, drawings, and numbers that link to the mission. Maybe one person grew her own tomatoes for the first time. Another learned how to turn kitchen scraps into compost that made his plants healthier and his trash lighter. Yet another made new friends while weeding and watering.

Now, put this information to work. Feature it in annual reports, volunteer and new gardener orientations, social media posts, grant requests and reports, volunteer recognition events, and board or community updates.

Start small: it is not necessary to pursue all these vehicles at once. Begin by adding mission and values connections to existing volunteer reports. Observe what is working and build out from there.

Rediscovering the Whole

Volunteer engagement requires a certain amount of artistry. It takes imagination to transform a big mission into manageable projects and roles that the community can join. It takes vision to reassemble the raw materials of time and talent into a rich mosaic of community. Embracing this artistry is a counterbalance to framing volunteerism as a series of numbers and spreadsheets. It is a pathway back to the whole.

Thanks to Erika Harding at The Groove Artspace in Albuquerque, New Mexico, for the workshop that helped inspire this blog!