Canada

In March of 2020, much of the in-person and organization-based formal volunteering came to a halt in Europe and North America. While informal volunteering and spontaneous people-helping movements forged on, the  organizations where many of us contribute our professional skills made drastic changes to volunteering and made them very fast. Organizations were forced to come up with solutions to provide or not provide services that were needed but had not previously been designated as paid positions.

As leaders of volunteers, communication and discovery are integral to being effective in our job. It anchors the work we do, whether it be within our organization as we have conversations with volunteers or colleagues, or externally as we focus on recruitment and engagement. As we navigate our way through our day-to-day activities with questions – asking them and answering them – it’s important to consider if we’re focusing on the right ones. Are we looking for more than YES and NO as answers? Are we using questions to drive our work?
           

Working with and through volunteer teams presents as many opportunities as it does challenges. In this Training Design, Nancy Shelford of the Canadian Cancer Society presents a Skills Mapping Workshop designed specifically to successfully empower volunteer groups to identify their strengths. This Training Design helps identify individual and group strengths, and can be used to help identify opportunities to welcome new team members’ skills to the fold.