The All-Volunteer Section: Bridging the Divide
An Invitation to Our Readers to Help Us Design, Create and Staff a Feature that Will Integrate All-Volunteer Organization Views
If everything had gone according to plan, what you would have found on this page would have been a third Keyboard Roundtable discussing a topic of special concern to the leaders of all-volunteer organizations. But a funny thing happened on the way to the computer! So we thought we'd share the story with you and ask for your input.
In brief, we ran into all sorts of obstacles in our attempt to find a Convening Editor for this topic and we then began to question whether or not this topic should even be handled as a Keyboard Roundtable. What we are certain about is that it's vital for e-Volunteerism to tackle the existing communication void between agency-based volunteer program practitioners and leaders/officers of all-volunteer organizations. Here's our reasoning:
Very Few Forums Address the Needs of Both "Halves" of Our World
For years, Steve and I and a host of others have written about the true scope of volunteerism. Intellectually, no one argues that the "volunteer community" (a phrase we even included in the title of this journal) means every sort of volunteer: the tutor and the firefighter; the patient visitor and the environmentalist; the museum tour guide and the election campaign worker. And, by extension, those we consider to be "leaders of volunteers" therefore include directors/coordinators of volunteer services, sole paid staff of otherwise all-volunteer activist groups, presidents of service and fraternal clubs, chiefs of volunteer fire companies, clergy, alumni directors, and political campaign managers--just to name a few! Ivan Scheier's article in this issue deals with this very subject.
Despite agreement about the nature of the "volunteer community," very few forums have been able to address the needs of both "halves" of our world. Once in a while an article from the "other side" turns up in a journal and occasionally a workshop presentation is offered that hints at the broader picture. Books, too, tend to take one or the other perspective. Some all-volunteer organization (AVO) leaders have discovered the volunteer management professional literature and realize its relevance to them. But my guess is that very few agency-based practitioners see the need to read or attend things aimed at the AVO world. This is true even though a percentage of such folks actually work with auxiliaries, special events committees, advisory councils, and other independent or quasi-independent all-volunteer groups as part of their agency responsibilities.
Please note that we are not talking about reaching frontline volunteers. The goal here is to reach anyone in a leadership position of any sort of volunteers. Another way to define this population is: people whose work (paid or unpaid) makes them interested in such common-denominator subjects as recruiting volunteers/members, designing work for volunteers to do, keeping volunteers motivated, recognizing efforts, etc.
Are we "worlds" apart or "words" apart? What are the commonalities that override our differences? By consciously including the AVO perspective in e-Volunteerism, we hope we will introduce the two "factions" to each other. Once inside these pages, perhaps leaders of both sides will read and respond to the full range of material here. In so doing, they are bound to "connect" with each other naturally.
So What's the Problem?
In order to attract subscribers from AVOs, e-Volunteerism must have content written for and by them, using vocabulary unique to them (for example, "member" rather than "volunteer"), and addressing subjects of genuine interest to them. But if the worlds have been separated for so long, how do we find someone to be this section editor who understands the quest to bridge the divide? There are not a lot of people with experience in crossing the lines.
Another issue is the fact that most volunteers who lead other volunteers (such as presidents of AVOs) rarely think about their work in this context. They have primary careers in lots of fields and do their volunteer leadership in their discretionary time. It's all they can do to handle the projects and activities under way in their AVO, without adding another layer of information. This means that the people most likely to understand "the field" are those who are actually paid to staff AVOs--almost always at the state or national level. For these people, AVO issues are their full-time job. But should we be approaching them to edit or contribute to this feature of our journal?
A third problem is that the AVO world itself has distinct sub-categories. How do we juggle the issues of great importance to, say, a local service club versus a large, politically-active church? If we ask an officer of a parent-teacher association to head this section, will s/he be able to recognize what a volunteer emergency squad needs to know? Maybe there are some good reasons why the challenge of connecting the two worlds together has proven so difficult for so long!
Where We Are Now
We did, in fact, invite a number of people (both volunteer officers and paid staff) to try their hand at this challenge. For a wide variety of personal and professional reasons, our initial candidates could not sign on. Finally, given the pressures of putting Issue 1 to bed, we reluctantly decided to delay the introduction of this feature section. Instead, since we told our Leap-of-Faith and Charter subscribers that they were part of an experiment, we are choosing to go public with our dilemma and ask for your help.
In addition, now that we have worked on the two existing Keyboard Roundtables (DOVIAs and International), we are unsure about whether or not the Roundtable format is the best one for what needs to be done for AVOs.
Please share your thoughts on the following two questions. When you respond, please identify whether you are agency-based or with an AVO:
- What would be of greatest value to you in a feature for and about all-volunteer organizations?
- Should this be another Keyboard Roundtable? If not, what other format would you prefer?
Finally, do you know of anyone (you can nominate yourself, too!) who might be a great candidate for the editor of this feature area? For this last question only, please respond privately to us at editor@e-volunteerism.com