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…
Category: <span>Reciprocity</span>
It’s that time of year again. The time when we sort out the best and the worst of the year behind us. I thought I might use hours, a common volunteer engagement metric, to assess key relationships in my life. As I review my calendar, one friend stands out for the amount of time we…
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…
Right relationship keeps surfacing in what I am reading and journaling, but I have struggled to sort it out in a blog related to volunteer engagement. It seemed like an appropriate time to remember this blog is a sandbox for experimentation and community conversation. One of the stumbling blocks was that I felt like I…
In a past 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…