In its final appearance, Along the Web presents "Impact Susan," a collection of articles about Susan J. Ellis and her lasting impact on the volunteer management profession that appeared around the country following her death in February 2019. Descriptions and links to these publications, online exchanges, and group chats are provided here as Along the Web, which Ellis created, bids farewell.
In his later years, Ivan Scheier finally learned how to use e-mail (at least in a sparing fashion) and to dabble in other parts of Web communication. He was definitely not a techie and probably not even comfortable with being a Web person, but you’ll still see his traces online, many created and sustained by his friends and admirers. In this Along the Web review, we cover the Mother Lode of online Ivan material, along with a few of the less obvious sources of information. Both areas relate to his professional work on volunteer management and a few of his other interests.
In 1983, Jane Mallory Park wrote one of the early books on volunteerism: Meaning Well Is Not Enough: Perspectives on Volunteering. In this book, Park discusses the legacy of volunteering that shaped what volunteers were doing in 1983, provided some solid, practical management advice, and looked to the possible future of the field.
In this Voices from the Past, we’ll excerpt sections from one of Park’s chapters, “Vision Volunteering.” Here, Park proposes “What if?” scenarios and speculates about such intriguing concepts as “promoting volunteer liberation” and “appealing to enlightened self-interest.”
In 1971, behavioral scientists and innovative trainers Eva Schindler-Rainman and Ronald Lippett published The Volunteer Community: Creative Use of Human Resources. Though the book is now out of print, many of its concepts continue to resonate. In this Voices from the Past, e-Volunteerism is pleased to publish an excerpt of Chapter Four, in which the authors present a force field analysis of volunteer motivation. The analysis helps explain what pushes people towards a “yes” to volunteering, and what pushes them towards a “no.” The authors do the same analysis on another equally important volunteering decision: whether to continue as a volunteer, or to drop out.
A few years ago, we reprinted an excerpt from a long out-of-print book written by Ivan H. Scheier in 1980 called Exploring Volunteer Space. We noted then that this volume contained ideas far ahead of its time – which is exactly what we’d come to expect from Ivan, one of the true pioneers of our field. We also promised to periodically reprint other sections and so we offer here the chapter entitled, “From Observation to Action.” You’ll find it thought-provoking, as Ivan explores “a relatively neglected area of volunteer space”: “a form of indirect participation in which what you see is what you give.”
There’s a phrase circulating that crops up periodically in speeches or books: “volunteers are not a program.” This concept can be traced back to an early article by Patty Bouse, Resource Development Specialist in the Nebraska Division of Social Services, in the Winter 1978 issue of what was then called Volunteer Administration. We reprint the article here, noting how little has changed in three decades in the challenge of gaining legitimate agency acceptance for volunteer contributions.
Synergist was a magazine published three times a year during the 1980s by the National Center for Service-Learning (NCSL), one of the lesser-known programs of the former American federal government agency, ACTION. NCSL provided resources and technical assistance to schools and agencies seeking best practices for service-learning projects for students. Synergist offered its articles at no charge and without copyright. The article reprinted here is the “Guest Speaker” feature from the Spring 1980 edition. It’s by a young Marian Wright Edelman, already director of the Children’s Defense Fund.
In her passionate essay, Edelman examines how students can combat small injustices to break the larger patterns of neglect bringing woe to millions of children. Still pertinent 25 years later, her words give a blueprint for taking constructive action as one person against the system.
Over a year ago, Steve McCurley sent Susan a gift from a local library book sale. It was a copy of the 1966 novel for teens by Alice Ross Colver, Vicky Barnes, Junior Hospital Volunteer: The Story of a Candy Striper. Steve was right that Susan would like this sample of volunteering folklore. How could she not, with dialogue throughout the 171 pages like this:
“I’m accepted!” she breathed. “At least I’m to appear for an Orientation Course next week Monday. Oh, Mother, I’m so terribly happy!” She stopped and ended with a wobbly smile on her face. “Here’s my report card. I got all A’s.”
“And that, if I’m not mistaken,” her mother said smilingly, “is an anticlimax.”
This Voices from the Past shares more of Vicky’s adventures as a volunteer as well as other references from older books for children and teens that shaped all our impressions of what volunteering is and who does it.
In 1980, VOLUNTEER: The National Center for Citizen Involvement (predecessor of the Points of Light Foundation) published Exploring Volunteer Space: The Recruiting of a Nation, by Ivan H. Scheier. As has been the case so often with Ivan’s writing, the book was way ahead of its time and unfortunately is now largely unknown. It is a joy to be able to use this “Voices from the Past” feature section of e-Volunteerism to reintroduce new readers to the very-much-still-relevant pages of Exploring Volunteer Space. In the Introduction, Ivan says:
The further cultivation of volunteering is the theme of this book; intensifying, energizing, and expanding it, working out from today’s career leadership of volunteering. The core is the director, coordinator or administrator of volunteer programs, plus resource people and organizations at local, state and national levels. These leaders number an estimated 70,000-80,000 people in the United States today…Without this leadership, there would be no significant volunteer movement for anyone to analyze here. Nevertheless, this leadership seems thin on the line, because the volunteer helping army is far larger than we suppose, and visible leadership, however, talented, shrinks drastically in relation.
In the excerpt presented here, we share Ivan’s thoughts on “Thick and Thin Leadership” – “Practical Issues in Career Effectiveness.” Over time, we’ll revisit Exploring Volunteer Space and give our readers more excerpts. And, since Ivan is Consulting Editor for this journal (/team/scheier.php), we may even hear from him directly in response.
You can tell the age of the book, The Citizen Volunteer , by the pronoun in its subtitle: His Responsibility, Role and Opportunity in Modern Society. The really ironic part is that the book was copyrighted in 1960 by the National Council of Jewish Women (NCJW)!
NCJW produced the book as part of the celebration of its 65th anniversary. They signed on Nathan E. Cohen, the Dean of the School of Applied Social Sciences at Case Western Reserve University as editor and he, in turn, asked seventeen different writers to contribute chapters. In this article, we examine what these social observers were thinking about volunteering just before the turmoil of the '60s decade - and how right or wrong they were in the last section of the book entitled "Looking Ahead."