Nonprofit leaders love to extol the virtues of volunteers. They declare that volunteers are the heart of the organization. They assert that the organization cannot do what it does without volunteer involvement. Yet the dirty little secret of the nonprofit sector is that many of these same leaders think that volunteers are more trouble…
Category: <span>Reciprocity</span>
I’ve been wanting to write about right relationship in volunteerism 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…
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…
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…