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Volunteer Work Design

Exploring Alternative Economies Through Volunteering

Established in 1964 and held every year in Western Australia, the Dowerin Field Day is an effort to find ways to prevent the small, wheat belt community of Dowerin from becoming a ghost town and to raise funds for improved community facilities. In an attempt to engender community backing for the project, organizers decided to “pay” each volunteer who contributes time to the event, by way of a cheque presented to a local charity or project chosen by the volunteer. As the Field Day's Web site says, "It was and continues to be a masterstroke in distributing much needed funds to deserving organisations across Western Australia’s wheat belt."

Should volunteers be paid for their time and efforts? Is the method a “masterstroke” to cleverly distribute money to deserving organizations? In this Keyboard Roundtable, leading commentators Susan J. Ellis, Steve McCurley, Jayne Cravens, Martin J. Cowling, Andy Fryar, Linda Graff and Betty Stallings debate the pros and cons of this and other alternate economy projects, which translate the hours contributed by volunteers into real cash.

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Effective Youth Engagement in Generation Y: Lessons from the Field

Despite all the theory and research about Generation Y — those individuals typically born between 1977 and 1997 — there still appears to be a considerable amount of confusion as to how volunteer managers can effectively engage this generation. Could this confusion stem from not clearly understanding the key factors that shape the lives and thinking of Gen Y? Author Catherine Williams thinks so. In this feature article, Williams reviews how effective engagement with today’s young adults involves moving beyond the hype associated with this generation and developing a deeper understanding of what shapes the lives of our younger generations. By sharing the stories of a few Gen Y individuals (also called Millennials), Williams presents some important lessons about why young people are not engaging in traditional volunteer roles. She also looks at the implications for volunteer management practices, and explores some of the changes that volunteer managers may need to consider in order to make volunteering relevant to this generation.

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What Are Volunteers Good At?

 “What kinds of work should volunteers do?” Volunteer program managers tend to run into this discussion in a number of different ways, often centering on the issue of whether volunteers can do some positions/work or whether only paid staff can do the work. And the usual context for this conversation is whether there are legal or other restrictions that prevent volunteers from doing some jobs. 

In this Points of View, Steve and Susan consider a somewhat different topic, one that’s worth both further discussion and research:  “What are volunteers good at?”  Or, to put it another way, “Is there work that unpaid volunteers do better than paid staff?”

And, of course, we also consider the reverse of that question: ”Is there work that paid staff do better than volunteers?”

 

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Training for Organization Leaders: Capitalize on Volunteer Resources During Tough Economic Times

In these incredibly difficult economic times, there is perhaps one silver lining: volunteer resources.  For those organizations wise enough to seize it, the economic crisis can be viewed as an opportunity to take advantage of the skills and ambitions that today’s volunteers have to offer.  This Training Design can be used to guide volunteer leaders in exploring the challenges and opportunities of volunteer management during economic distress. Participants in the training  learn six strategies to capitalize on volunteer resources during tough times. The result?  A win-win for both organizations and volunteers.

 

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Drop-in Volunteers and the Benefits of Flexibility

We’ve worked diligently to raise the standards of volunteer management. But we shouldn’t lose sight of some of the things that make volunteering different from paid employment, and help capture the volunteer spirit. In the past decade or so, we’ve tackled two types of volunteering that differ significantly from the regularly scheduled volunteer, namely, the “spontaneous” volunteer and those who volunteer single “days of service.” In this Points of View, we want to examine yet another effective and wonderful volunteering variation:  the “drop-in” volunteer.  We review why drop-in programs work best if they minimize the time between when volunteers show up and when they actually begin work. And we review how agencies can provide such spontaneous opportunities while keeping the agency and its clients safe.  

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Exploring Volunteer Space: The Recruiting of a Nation

This issue of Research to Practice takes a look at something that isn’t a typical research report and was written almost 30 years ago. Exploring Volunteer Space: The Recruiting of a Nation was Ivan Scheier’s greatest work – an exploration both of his own mind and of the universe of volunteering.  In this report, Ivan outlines much of what volunteering can be and a great deal of what would happen in volunteering in the future. While Exploring Volunteer Space is a highly conceptual work, it has great and continuing relevance to practitioners who think about the development of their volunteer programs.

The People Approach to Volunteer Work Design

In the 1970s, many in volunteer management were concerned with making the field more professional by adopting and adapting personnel practices from private business.  Ivan Scheier believed this was not only wrong-headed but almost the opposite of what we should be doing.  Instead, Ivan preferred and promoted a way to develop roles for volunteers that he called “The People Approach.”  In this article, Rick Lynch explores the application of Ivan's People Approach to designing roles for volunteers in the present-day world.

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Flexible Volunteering: One Size Fits All

Many organizations now look specifically at the ways volunteers connect with them and how they can create new opportunities to involve volunteers of any age. This feature story explores a relatively new way to create more pathways to volunteering – “flexible volunteering.”   Flexible volunteering offers individuals a variety of different and relatively simple ways to contribute their services. Janica Fisher of Humanity In Practice (H!P) in Calgary, Alberta, Canada, explains why flexible volunteering is the secret to engaging more volunteers, and how it can be used to create meaningful ways to support an agency at the convenience of the volunteers.

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Banking on Volunteer Talents

When Elizabeth Ellis was Volunteer Development Manager for the Girl Scouts of Minnesota and Wisconsin River Valleys, she managed, promoted and expanded their “Talent Match” database. This database listed the specific skills, preferred service locations, age group preferences and availability of individuals specifically recruited for this database. Both staff and adult volunteer Girl Scout leaders utilized this resource through a password-protected search to match their unique needs to volunteer interests and availability.

In this feature story, Ellis reviews the multiple benefits of creating a similar "talent" database for organizations, and explores the potential of “banking on volunteer talents” and time. She also reviews the multiple benefits of developing a similar "skills bank," and shares a model for how to make it work. Says Ellis, “Being on the front lines of volunteer recruitment, I had the opportunity to experience the growing interest of potential volunteers using this model, as well as experience first-hand the impact of this end user-friendly matching technique."

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