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…
Author: <span>Sue Carter Kahl</span>
As 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…
I’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…
In a 2018 article, nonprofit leader Jan Masaoka called the nonprofit sector to task. She named the growing professionalization of the sector and its reliance on consultants as a step away from nonprofit roots in activism and the causes that drive it. This shift has led to increasing “sophistication” in nonprofit operations, with paid professionals more…
It is easy to feel overwhelmed. Problems seem so big, and our hands and voices seem so small. Yet, there is something powerful about putting our hands to work in a meaningful way. There is something encouraging about discovering voices who are drawn to work that calls us too. It is a gift to have…
“Volunteering is the ultimate exercise in democracy. You vote in elections once a year, but when you volunteer, you vote every day about the kind of community you want to live in.” -Author unknown I’ve always liked this quote, but my experience is that volunteers are a pretty homogeneous group in many organizations. Perhaps volunteerism…
I often begin workshops on volunteer engagement asking people about their volunteerism and what was meaningful about it. Not once has anyone said that what was most meaningful about their volunteer work was serving 104 hours. Conversely, as a former nonprofit executive, I am keenly aware that organizations need to demonstrate effectiveness. Yet when we…
Preparations for a course on Volunteer Engagement have me thinking about how we apply diversity, equity, and inclusion (DEI) principles to volunteerism in meaningful ways. What does DEI look like in volunteer engagement – from design to implementation? How do we invest in volunteerism so that it provides a bridge from the community into the…
I think a lot about the relationship between volunteerism and community. It is easy to see volunteerism as an extension of community. But sometimes I wonder if we need volunteerism because we have a deficit of community. Or that volunteerism is a way that we outsource community to institutions like nonprofits or government agencies. It…
In June, I wrote a blog about the dangers of centering the service experience primarily on volunteers while the client, staff, and organizational needs took a back seat. The question of who we center in volunteerism has stuck with me (thanks to Vu Le’s post on who we center in fundraising). It got me thinking…