All-Volunteer Group Leadership

Recruiting volunteers to be the leaders or presidents of their organizations can be a daunting task.  Once there, these leaders take on the role with varying levels of effectiveness.  Given their brief leadership reigns and the unusual circumstances bringing them to the position in the first place, it’s no wonder their success can be haphazard.  Though they may have minimal leadership experience, they are expected to be passionate promoters of their cause, highly visible organizational members, fundraisers extraordinaire, brilliant organizers, and empathetic and encouraging managers.  The volunteers who take on leadership of these organizations must be skilled in working not only with volunteers, but also with paid staff and the general community as well.  This article highlights the need for recognizing the various populations with whom a non-paid leader will interact and offers some advice on making the most of those relationships.

Research-to-Practice Editor Steven Howlett re-visits a paper by Colin Rochester published in Voluntary Action, the journal of the Institute for Volunteering Research in 1999, about the management implications for volunteer coordination based on the organisational setting in which it takes place. Rochester observed that organisational context will impact upon how volunteering is managed, but this context is not very well addressed in the research literature and, as a result, best practice writing often gives minimal advice about how practice can vary from organisation to organisation.

The paper argues that there have been two implicit assumptions in the literature which may explain why the organisational context of volunteering has received less attention. The first is that what is being measured and described as volunteering is seen to be essentially the same activity regardless of where it happens. Second is the tendency to view volunteering as part of the non-profit sector, where it is seen as primarily unpaid workers contributing to the goals of the organisation; the result of this is a dominance management language emphasising the ‘workplace model’ of management.

Note:  Thanks to the generous permission of the Institute for Volunteering Research, the full text of the original study is provided as a PDF accompanying this review.

Meetings, no matter what format is used, take considerable time. I hear many stories about the difficulty organizations are experiencing as they recruit volunteers for the board, a committee or a special project team because of the number of meetings required or because these individuals have ‘heard about the meetings’ from others! Imagine the difference if current volunteers were promoting involvement by saying: “You really want to be part of our group…we have the best meetings I have ever attended!”

So, we want to ensure we aren’t wasting volunteers’ time, nor discouraging others with unproductive, boring, never-ending meetings. This training design might be used as part of an orientation for individuals taking on the role of chairing a committee or as a tool to assist a group that has identified that their meetings need to be more focussed….

Barb Gemmell provides group exercises and worksheets on the five key meeting elements – Minutes, Agendas, Groundrules, Involvement and Consensus – so that you can add MAGIC to your meetings, too.

Nametags are your best friends – especially in volunteer situations where new people constantly come and go. They provide outlets for communication not unlike front porches, in that they make people less uncertain and more approachable. What’s more, with the disclosure of personal information, nametags close the chasm between synergy and isolation, thereby transforming strangers into friends.

This Training Design explores four basic principles of nametags:

• Preparation and Creation
• Designing and Wearing Nametags Effectively
• Implementing Nametags during Meetings and Activities
• Leveraging Nametags in Specific Fields

And it does so with humor, illustrations, and even a cartoon! Scott Ginsberg is "the world's foremost field expert on nametags" and the author of HELLO my name is Scott.

Hong Kong has a long history of developing volunteer services. People from all walks of life are familiar with the concept of volunteerism while a wide variety of specific volunteer opportunities have been opening up, ranging from management roles to the execution of specific projects and tasks. The quality of volunteers and the sustainability of volunteer participation have become significant concerns within many volunteer organizations. It is expected that volunteers shall be well trained and equipped with adequate knowledge and appropriate skills to serve the needy. Further, it is believed that the enhancement of volunteer competencies and increased job satisfaction will lead to a higher commitment to volunteering.

The Agency for Volunteer Service (AVS) maintains a pool of over 10,000 volunteers and, in order to address some of these issues, established its Volunteer Training and Development Centre in 2003. A new initiative of the Centre is the “VQ Sustainable Training Scheme,“ promoting “Volunteer Quotient towards Volunteer Quality” – an attempt to provide progressive training to enhance the quality of AVS volunteers as well as to sustain their commitment to and aspiration of helping others.

This article provides an overview of what VQ is, how the training is structured, the three levels of achievement, who is being trained and who is doing the training, and other elements of the pilot project underway.