Collaboration
Mini-Max: Ivan's Game with a Purpose
Ivan Scheier delighted in creating group exercises that allowed people to actively interact, have fun and still accomplish serious goals. One of his early and most popular training designs started out as “Mini-Max” and evolved over 20 years into other formats, notably the “Glad Give Game.” The ultimate purpose of the design is to show a group of people that they all have something to give that is of value to someone else – and to create interpersonal commitments to exchange service. The process was obviously a real community builder.
In this Training Design, we present the original Mini-Max process. We explain how it was originally developed to help delinquents and volunteers interact, and how to adapt it to new situations.
The Wall between Faith-Based and Secular Volunteerism: Is it Time to Chip Away at the Barrier?
The wall between church and state in the United States often extends to a wall of separation, ignorance or avoidance between secular and faith-based volunteering. In this deeply personal article for e-Volunteerism, author Karen Kogler encourages the dismantling of that wall. She describes the world of faith-based volunteerism, and gives practical help to secular volunteer managers on how to build partnerships with faith-based organizations. She notes the challenges in pursing this goal, and describes the benefits to both sides in working together. Writes Kogler, “As I see it, both the faith-based and secular worlds of volunteerism would benefit from the demolition of the wall that often separates us.”
The Other Half of the Volunteer World
Much of volunteering happens outside of formal agencies and what we call “volunteer programs.” Think of the thousands of all-volunteer associations, civic and service clubs, faith communities, professional societies and other groups with none or only a few paid staff – but each has its own leaders, most often volunteers themselves. These leaders are, in all ways, practicing volunteer management, but they do so in isolation from our field. Working with volunteers who are self-led and working with those in agency-based programs has more similarities than differences, yet there is little evidence that volunteer program managers ever talk to the officers of all-volunteer groups or vice versa. In this Points of View, we discuss how this is a great waste of potential.
Brisbane's Homeless Connect Initiative
Homeless Connect is an initiative of the Brisbane City Council (Australia) to put over 300 homeless persons in contact with various service providers from housing, medical and legal organizations. This comprehensive one-day effort, staged in City Hall, also links service providers within the homeless sector. Volunteering Queensland has twice recruited and trained over 200 volunteers to provide one-to-one support to the homeless participants, clearly an enormous undertaking that ensured the success of Homeless Connect in 2006 and 2007. This article explains how Volunteering Queensland accomplished this task.
Getting Ninety People to Consensus: A Non-training Design
How do you avoid having to sell a solution or future direction that the management or leadership team has created? Because it IS a sell job when a few people decide on a new way for the many. When there are circumstances where any answer is a potential right answer – and there is a large group of stakeholders invested in that answer – there is another way: large group interventions (LGI). Instead of training people on a new direction and having to parry objections and dissatisfactions, including them in the creation process avoids the uphill battle.
There are several designs for large group participative events: Search Conferences, Future Search Conferences, Open Space Technology, Real Time Strategic Change, World Café, and the Technology of Participation, to name some of the most popular. There are some basic principles behind all of these techniques that are discussed in this article, along with specific design ideas when using the search conference method.
Collaboration and Partnership: Using a Process to Facilitate Success
The potential for partnership exists for every organization. Partnerships can be formed within the nonprofit sector as well as with for-profits and government. We can share space, equipment, staff and volunteers, training, experience, events, revenue – the list is endless. It is said that communities have the social capitol required to be self-sustaining. The challenge lies in mapping who can contribute what to meet the needs. This is the basis for forming a successful partnership.
In this article, Deb Anderson provides some of the fundamentals for creating and maintaining collaborations of all sorts.
The 'T' Word in Volunteer Management: A Creative Approach to Getting Volunteers into Training
South Australia boasts the highest volunteering rate in Australia, celebrates a strong level of government support for volunteers and even has volunteer involvement featured in the state’s ‘strategic plan’. The northern suburbs of Adelaide, South Australia’s capital city, has often been viewed as a hot bed for volunteerism, and so there were few surprises when a strong volunteer management sub-committee was formed as part of a broader initiative, called the Northern Collaborative Project (NCP).
A key problem tackled by this working party was the question of how to encourage more volunteers to undertake the training required of them by their organisations. The solution was that the group developed an annual training conference for their volunteers called ‘Volunteer Fest’.
Now gearing up for the third event, this article shares the experiences of the volunteer leaders who, through this forum, have revolutionized volunteer training in their local area.