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…
Volunteer Commons Posts
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…
After a keynote addressing equity in nonprofit organizations, an attendee asked for data to demonstrate the ROI of equity. She wanted to know if nonprofit equity investments work. The answer: there isn’t much data on what works. Maybe that is not the right question though. Perhaps we are looking for the wrong data to justify…
In his recent blog, nonprofit leader Vu Le wondered if nonprofits and philanthropy have become the “white moderates” that Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. warned about in his Letter from a Birmingham Jail. Le called out fundraising practices “centered entirely on making donors who are mostly white feel good about themselves” as one example of…
COVID-19 is shaking up volunteerism in ways that would seem unthinkable just a few months ago. Many organizations cannot have their volunteers serve due to program closures or health restrictions. Other organizations have had to quickly re-design their programming and bring on volunteers to serve in new ways. This upheaval is jarring, but it offers…
One of my research aims has been to figure out how to measure volunteer impact. It seemed that if we could identify the “right” volunteer metrics, then nonprofit leaders could justify investing in volunteerism. It hasn’t turn out the way I expected. First, I discovered how much language mattered. Every time I facilitated a session…
Disasters have a way of showing us the tensions that lie just under the surface of our pretenses. In the U.S., that shows up as an espoused belief in community and communal ideals even as we celebrate rugged individualism and bootstrapping, rags-to-riches successes. We are especially conflicted about volunteering because it holds an inherent cognitive…
“We are so anxious to classify and categorize, both nature and human nature. It is a beautiful impulse – to contain the infinite in the finite, to wrest order from the chaos, to construct a foothold so we may climb toward higher truth. It is also a limiting one, for in naming things we often…