Colleague Martin Cowling recently did a training with a group of volunteer centers (he’s being coy about which country he was in, but I have my suspicions…) and he asked how many of them utilize volunteers in their own operations.
The majority of these volunteer centers did not not involve volunteers themselves.
As he says in his blog on this subject:
The reasons these guys had for not engaging volunteers in their own work were jaw dropping when you consider these were Volunteer Centres:
- “the roles are too complex”
- “we don’t have time to train volunteers”
- “we know we should have volunteers”
- “we have one volunteer”
- “we have found volunteers to be unreliable“
Martin concludes:
The very institutions charged with promoting volunteerism should be the ones who engage volunteers first.
For those of you in the USA of a certain age: remember how on Saturday Night Live, Prymaat Conehead would suddenly start saying, “Unacceptable! Unacceptable!” when he was really upset? That’s how I feel right now. I think the shape of my head alters as well as I hear about volunteer centers that don’t involve volunteers.
Why would anyone trust a volunteer center, or a nonprofit that runs an online database of volunteering opportunities, that does not involve volunteers themselves?!
If your organization promotes volunteerism, you had better have volunteers at your organization – short-term volunteers/micro-volunteers, leadership volunteers, and everything in between! And you had better note that involvement on your web site!
And I’ll go further:
If you are a volunteer manager, a volunteer resources manager, or anyone else responsible for recruiting and placing volunteers at your organization, you had better involve volunteers yourself in your own work, in all the ways you are wanting other staff to involve volunteers!
and
If you are a volunteer management/community engagement consultant, you had better volunteered yourself, worked with other volunteers, volunteers online, and otherwise engaged in volunteer management-related activities in at least the last six months!
How can you call yourself a credible volunteer center, a credible promoter of volunteerism, or a credible volunteer management trainer otherwise?!
Also see
UK Volunteering Tsar Doesn’t Have Time to Volunteer
Tags: volunteering, volunteers, community, engagement, international, volunteerism, volunteering, training, trainer
Great post! Our biggest challenge as a Volunteer Center (in Brazil) is to make other organizations realize all the benefits of working with volunteers. Our own experience is an example: our work has only been possible through the collaboration of volunteers, including online volunteers.
Then kudos to you, Brazil!