“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…
Category: <span>Making the Invisible Visible</span>
“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…
Nonprofits 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…
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…
In my volunteer value workshops, participants snap a picture of one slide more than any other: the iceberg. It seems to capture what many of us struggle to put into words. What is visible about volunteer value is small compared to all the ways that volunteers add value. The iceberg image also helps reveal the…
I just finished reading Fr. Gregory Boyle’s Barking to the Choir. The following sentence hooked me and wouldn’t let go. “We always seem to be faced with this choice: to save the world or savor it. I want to propose that savoring is better, and that when we seek to ‘save’ and ‘contribute’ and ‘give…
Volunteer numbers. Service hours. The financial value of volunteer time. These are the figures tucked into reports on volunteerism. It’s all well and good for compliance. Yet it doesn’t tell us much about if or how volunteers had an impact on the community. Isn’t that interesting? The things we report most tell us little about…
When I taught strategic volunteer engagement, students often described their agencies’ work with volunteers as an afterthought. Sure, they involved volunteers, but there wasn’t much intention or investment in the effort. It seemed that having some volunteers in some roles was somewhat good enough. As if volunteers were just one more box to check, an…
[Link to the latest version of this blog – typically updated during National Volunteer Week in the U.S.] “The most enduring and controversial question within the field of volunteerism is the one that relates to the ‘value’ of volunteers and the hours they contribute”. Andy Fryar This enduring question comes to the forefront each year…