Monthly Archives: April 2015

How to help Baltimore

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I’ve written about how to help Nepal. So… what about Baltimore, site of so much violence, civil unrest, economic injustice, mistrust and lack of opportunity ?

Just like with Nepal, my first comment is going to be: do not go to Baltimore to help. Not yet. Not without a formal affiliation with a LOCAL nonprofit. If you want to help any of these nonprofits, FIRST, you must contact them and tell them what you want to do as a volunteer, onsite in Baltimore or online and offer references that can confirm your abilities and character. If you want to travel to Baltimore,  you need to say when you will be in Baltimore, and state that you will pay for your own transportation, housing, food and all other needs, that you are not, in any way, expecting the nonprofit to provide you any funding or support for your travel or accommodations. And you need to be ready for rejection: most of these nonprofits are completely overwhelmed and may not have the resources and funding to involve an influx of outside volunteers.

Here are some credible nonprofit organizations that are based in Baltimore and are focused on economic empowerment, helping economically disadvantaged people, and/or building stronger, more empathetic, compassionate environments.  I haven’t fully vetted them beyond knowing they exist and are appropriately registered – I haven’t typed the name of each nonprofit into Google or Bing with words like “complaint” and “fraud” and “sued,” to see if anything came up, for instance. But if I had a lot of money to give, I wouldn’t hesitate to give to each of them:

Enoch Pratt Free Library
Serves the residents of Baltimore with locations throughout the city. In addition to being a traditional lending library, it also provides accessibility services, online tutors,
Internet access, classes and events, and kids and teens services.

Community College of Baltimore County
Provide undergraduate education, workforce development, technology training, and lifelong learning/life enrichment in the Baltimore Metropolitan area.

Maryland New Directions, Inc.
Mission: To provide comphrensive career counseling, employment assistance, and post-employment support to people who are in life and career transition. Since 1973, Maryland New Directions has served over 130,000 individuals looking to become self-sustaining through employment.

Public Justice Center, Inc.
Nonprofit legal advocacy organization. We work with people and communities to confront the laws, practices, and institutions that cause injustice, poverty, and discrimination. We advocate in the courts, legislatures, and government agencies, educate the public, and build coalitions, all to advance our mission of “pursuing systemic change to build a just society.”

The Baltimore Station, Inc.
Concentrates on helping veterans that have fallen on hard times. We know that they suffer a special kind of hell, returning to society with the effects of combat (including Post Traumatic Stress Disorder), often turning to drugs to silence the trauma. We know the cycle that can spin out of control, leading to poverty, estrangement and homelessness. We know what it takes to break that cycle – a highly structured environment – because most of our staff is in recovery themselves and half are veterans. Recovery is not a “quick fix” battle. It’s a long tough war.

Baltimore Cash Campaign
Connects clients to asset building resources, including financial education classes, one-on-one financial coaching, mainstream banking opportunities (instead of for-profit cash-advance and check-cashing companies), and credit counseling (debt is a major challenge to severely economically disadvantaged people), conducts marketing and outreach about the Earned Income Tax Credit (EITC) and other relevant tax credits for low-income workers, provides free volunteer income tax assistance (VITA), and advocates for issues impacting working families

Win Family Services
Target demographics: at-risk youth and their families. Programs: treatment foster care, community mental health, therapy, and a talent development after-school program

Baltimore Humane Society
I believe with all my heart that encouraging compassion and care for animals cultivates compassion and care for humans.

St. Ambrose Housing Aid Center
Works to create and maintain equal housing opportunities for low- and moderate-income people, primarily in Baltimore City, and to encourage and support strong and diverse neighborhoods. (this was added after the blog’s original publication – thanks, Kate Bladow, for the rec)

Maryland New Directions
a non-profit dedicated to improving lives in Baltimore through employment. (this was added after the blog’s original publication)

Don’t stop there: look for nonprofits in Baltimore that are focused on giving all people access to the arts, such as dance and theatre, or that are focused on sports, or senior services, or whatever activity you think could help the people of the city. Look at Volunteer Central Baltimore and VolunteerMatch as well for nonprofits seeking volunteers in Baltimore.

It was a beautiful thing to see all of those local people in Baltimore spontaneously volunteering in their community, starting to clean up even DURING the riots. So many people, so many photos. Just go to Twitter and search for Baltimore and volunteers, and you will see what I mean. Wouldn’t it be great if all of those people, as well as those that were rioting, volunteered with even one of these nonprofits? And wouldn’t it be great if those nonprofits had the training and resources to involve that influx of volunteers?

Also see:

We need volunteer police officers – & an overhaul as well

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The tragic, utterly avoidable death of Eric Harris, shot and killed by Robert Bates, a volunteer police reservist in Tulsa, Oklahoma, has lead not only to grief and protests, but also to some people, including police professionals, saying the involvement of volunteer police officers needs to end.

I am not one of those people.

I’ve been reading all that I can about this tragedy, and there were so many red flags before this shooting, about not only the shooter, but the agency’s involvement of volunteers overall:

  • it’s doubtful the volunteer had received proper training and certification to perform the law-enforcement duties he was allowed to perform
  • it’s doubtful the volunteer had receive proper training regarding the carrying and use of firearms on the job
  • it seems the reservist was, essentially, paying to volunteer alongside career police officers – he donated tens of thousands of dollars in cars, SUVs and equipment to the Tulsa County Sheriff’s Office over the past 10 years
  • there’s no evidence that this volunteer was properly supervised or screened regarding the roles he was undertaking on the police force
  • this volunteer was involved in a violent crimes and narcotics task force, not as an observer, but as an arresting officer, and was equipped with a firearm – it cannot be shown that his involvement in these activities, and that his carrying a firearm, was necessary at all

We would never tolerate a career police officer lacking that kind of screening, training and support – we should not tolerate it of a volunteer.

And then there is the reason that some law enforcement agencies involve volunteers; note this excerpt from an article from CNN:

Why do law enforcement agencies have volunteers?
Money, money, money.

Strapped police departments are increasingly looking to do more with fewer resources, and volunteer programs can help plug holes in their operating budgets, says the International Association of Chiefs of Police, which runs the Volunteers in Police Service program. 

Of course, that statement makes me INSANE, because that is NOT the primary reason why an agency should be involving volunteers! This kind of mentality is what pushing the dollar value of volunteer hours by the Independent Sector, the Corporation National Service, and others is causing: the myth that volunteers are free, and that the best reason to involve volunteers is because they save money.

Why involve volunteer police officers? Here are FAR better reasons than “money, money, money”:

  • The motto of so many police forces is “to protect and serve.” Volunteers can be representatives of that community the police serve. Volunteer involvement can be an excellent way to connect more deeply with community members, by having them see local police work first hand and, to a degree, participating in such. Volunteer involvement allows members of the community to come into a police agency, as volunteers (and, therefore, with no financial stake in the agency), to see for themselves the work that agency does. Involving volunteers — representatives of the community — can help educate the community about what the police do, even changing negative perceptions.
  • Community engagement is community ownership. Volunteer involvement demonstrates that the community is invested in the police and its goals, that they feel a part of those goals. They are more likely to be supportive of the police if they feel ownership of such.
  • Involving volunteers can help your organization reach particular demographic groups — people of a particular age, in a particular neighborhood, of a particular economic level, etc., especially groups who might not be involved with your organization otherwise. How does diversity among your volunteer ranks reflect the diversity of your community?

Police, what demographics are represented among your volunteers, and how does this show community involvement at your agency? What feedback have volunteers provided that has affected your organization, such as improving your services? What do volunteers say about your organization’s performance? How have volunteers helped you build bridges with communities in ways that your career folks could not? If you cannot answer these questions, you are NOT involving volunteers for the right reasons!

Should police be involved in pursuing suspects, investigation of violent crimes, SWAT teams, narcotics task force, and other high-risk activities? Sure – BUT ONLY IF THEY HAVE REGULAR, UP-TO-DATE TRAINING AND PROPER SUPERVISION. This clearly was NOT the case in Tulsa.

Lower-risk-and-still-meaningful ways to involve police volunteers – many of them NOT requiring the officer to carry a firearm:

  • policing community events such as fairs and charitable events
  • staffing DUI checkpoints
  • missing persons investigations
  • neighborhood patrol
  • sex-offender management
  • traffic control
  • helping to staff court proceedings
  • serving low-risk warrants/supporting warrant compliance
  • filling low-risk roles in jails (such as administrative)
  • helping after disasters
  • helping crime victims/victim services
  • leading community events such as bicycle events that promote safety and bike registration
  • chaplaincy
  • code enforcement
  • crime prevention programs
  • translation
  • equipment maintenance

But even in these lower-risk ways, even if volunteer police will not be carrying a firearm, volunteer police still need regular, up-to-date training and proper supervision! THAT REQUIREMENT NEVER CHANGES. They need to be trained even if their role is only to observe and report.

Volunteer police reservists can be an excellent way to connect more deeply with community members, and MORE police departments need to be doing it, not less, particularly in areas where there is friction between the police and those served. But clearly, many police departments need a radical overhaul of their volunteer engagement, particularly regarding volunteers’ training, record-keeping about their training, roles they are given and supervision they are provided. Getting rid of volunteer police has the potential to create even wider cultural gaps between police and the communities they are supposed to serve.

Also see:

When ICT help goes wrong: warning for aid workers going to Nepal

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Here is a comment I read on one of the many online discussion groups I follow, and I think it is really important for aid workers to keep in mind when going to developing countries to help, particularly in post-disaster situations. I’ve removed any specific identifying information, and any emphasis is mine:

One issue we’ve observed many times when doing relief work, perhaps worst in the 2004 tsunami, the 2003 conflict in the Congo, and 2010 in Haiti, is that areas with modest ICT infrastructure that was adequate to the sustainable needs of their market, are swamped by aid workers with immodest expectations. i.e. a desire to video-chat with their families every day, play WoW, and download video porn. So they all show up, and declare “repairing the Internet infrastructure” (to levels never before seen) to be their first priority. They run rough-shod over the local infrastructure operators, step on carefully-regulated or carefully-negotiated frequency allocations, etc.

I very much hope we won’t have to deal with that in this case. Nepal’s ICT environment is mature, its professionals are expert, and its community is well connected. If and when they need help, they’re perfectly capable of indicating what help they need, and anyone from the outside who believes they know better is WRONG. So, if you’re interested in helping, by all means, make your availability known to any of the many other ICT professionals in-country, but please don’t assume that you know what’s needed, or worse, that they don’t.

The Swedish-Finnish telco TeliaSonera operates in Nepal and is engaged in relief efforts, and is urging everyone in Nepal to communicate whenever possible by SMS rather than voice in order to minimize the strain of the network.

Also see: How to help Nepal

How to help Nepal

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I’m already seeing these posts online:

How can I go to Nepal and help regarding the earthquake?!

Unless you have specific areas of expertise regarding post-disaster situations, speak Nepalese, and can go under the auspices of a respected non-governmental organization or your own government, DO NOT GO. And please don’t start collecting things to send to Nepal either.

When a disaster strikes, thousands of people start contacting various organizations and posting to online groups in an effort to try to volunteer onsite at the disaster site. If the disaster happens in the USA, some people jump in their cars and drive to the area.

But what most of these people don’t realize is that spontaneous volunteers without specific training and no affiliation can cause far more problems than they alleviate in a disaster situation, particularly regarding disaster locations far from their home. Consider this:

  • In many post-disaster situations, there is NO food, shelter, services or gas to spare for volunteers. Many volunteers going into the Philippines, Pakistan, Haiti, Japan, even the Gulf Coast states in the USA after Katrina or states affected by Sandy, had to be absolutely self-sustaining for many, many days, even many  weeks. No shelter or safety measures could be provided to these volunteers by the government. Those volunteers who weren’t self-sustaining created big problems and diverted attention from local people in need.
  • Just because you have some equipment does not mean you are ready to volunteer: inexperienced people have been killed using chainsaws after hurricanes and other disasters, by falling limbs and live electrical wires, during their DIY clean up efforts. Responding to these people when they get themselves into a jam takes away from the needs of local people.
  • In disaster situations, you are going to be encountering disaster victims. They are going to be stressed, maybe desperate, and maybe angry. As a trained volunteer or paid staff member working with a credible organization, you are going to know how to comfort these people and direct them to where they can get assistance, and how to convince them that you have to save this person over here instead of their relative over there. If you are untrained and unaffiliated, you may become a target of their anger, because you cannot provide them with appropriate assistance, or because you provide them with incorrect information.
  • What will you do when you are accused of stealing from someone? Of harming someone? Of making a situation worse? What do you know about local customs and cultural taboos that, if you violate them, could taint all outside volunteer efforts? Aid workers have been arrested, even killed, because of cultural missteps. Who will navigate local bureaucracies to save YOU in such situations?

I could go on and on – and I do, on this web page about how to help people affected by a huge disaster. Disasters are incredibly complicated situations that require people with a very high degree of qualifications and long-term commitment, not just good will, a sense of urgency and short-term availability.

Also, more and more agencies are hiring local people, even immediately after a disaster, to clean rubble, remove dead bodies, build temporary housing, rebuild homes and essential buildings, and prepare and distribute food. Hiring local people to do these activities, rather than bringing people in from the outside, helps stabilize local people’s lives much more quickly!

If you want to help the people of Nepal, donate to CARE International’s efforts in Nepal and/or UNICEF’s efforts in Nepal and/or Save the Children’s efforts in Nepal (all of these organizations serve all people, not just children).

Here’s more about donating Things Instead of Cash or Time (In-Kind Contributions).

If you want to go abroad to help after a disaster, then here is advice on how to start pursuing the training and experience you need to be in a position to do that – it will take you about 24 months (two years) to get the minimum of what you will need to apply to volunteer for such scenarios.

Also see:

Volunteering empowers, activates, builds, communicates

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CDSckppWMAAvCDsA fabulous quote by Elisabeth Kisakye, of Mozambique and a VSO volunteer (seen in the photo at left):

“Volunteering empowers people to move from being passive recipients to active beneficiaries.”

She said this at the United Nations April joint session of the Financing for Development (FfD) process and the intergovernmental negotiations on the post-2015 development agenda.

I love this statement because it is the TRUE value of volunteers. Are you listening, Independent Sector, Corporation for National Service, governments and corporations? The true value of volunteers is NOT a monetary amount for hours served!

Maybe a more accurate statement would be:

“Volunteering can empower people to move from being passive recipients to active beneficiaries. Volunteering can engage the community, create more dialogue with those a program is meant to serve, promote transparency in decision-making, and create ownership in a program’s goals.”

Oh, I could go on and on…

Two things make volunteer engagement oh-so-different than mere human resources management: Volunteers are unpaid, and volunteer engagement is a program. I will never understand why managers of volunteers aren’t sitting in on every program meeting, and charged to find ways that volunteer engagement can be fully integrated into the mission of an organization. Instead, too many organizations treat managers of volunteers as human resources managers: finding people to do unpaid work so that the organization can save money by not hiring a consultant or employee. Too many managers of volunteers have a primary priority of finding free labor, period. And primarily valuing volunteers by a monetary value for their time served reinforces this horribly outdated way of thinking about reason to involve volunteers.

Elisabeth Kisakye understands this. Why don’t others?

Note: The “post-2015” talk is regarding the soon-to-expire Millennium Development Goals (MDGs), which set targets for halving extreme poverty rates, halting the spread of HIV/AIDS, promoting gender equality and empowering women, providing universal primary education, and more, all by 2015. People are tweeting about the ongoing discussions with the tags #post2015 , #action2015 S and .

Also see:

Research: Immunity under the Volunteer Protection Act (USA)

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graphic by Jayne Cravens representing work of volunteersVolume 6, Issue 1 (Apr 2015) of the Nonprofit Policy Forum features research by Patricia Groble and Jeffrey L. Brudney, “When Good Intentions Go Wrong: Immunity under the Volunteer Protection Act.” It’s research about a law in the USA. The abstract says:

The Volunteer Protection Act (VPA) was enacted in 1997 to encourage volunteerism by protecting individuals from liability for their negligent actions while volunteering. Proponents intended to provide legal safeguards for volunteers, whom they claimed were deterred from volunteering by fears of liability. Little attention has been paid to this legislation since its enactment, however. This article examines the implementation and interpretation of the VPA through the lens of case law to determine whether the act has had its intended effects for volunteers. Our analysis of all court cases in which the VPA has been cited shows that volunteers are at risk for lawsuits over a variety of actions during the course of their volunteer activities. This analysis also demonstrates that although volunteers can avail themselves of the VPA’s protection, their success in invoking this defense is mixed.

A must read for managers of volunteers… however, it’s cost-prohibitive for most of them: the article costs $42.00 / 30,00 € / £23.00 to access (the entire issue of the journal is $235.00 / 172,00 € / £129.00. I’ll be heading to my local library to see if I can access it through them (I suspect I’ll have to schlep 100 minutes by mass transit one-way, all the way to downtown Portland via the bus and train to read it, in order to read it). The Nonprofit Policy Forum is an international journal that publishes original research and analysis on public policy issues and the public policy process related to the work of nonprofit organizations.

Also see: List of

List of research and evaluations of virtual volunteering, as a practice in general or focused on specific projects (much of the research is free to access).

Isn’t my good heart & desire enough to help abroad?

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graphic by Jayne Cravens representing volunteersAn email below that I got recently, which I’ve edited here for brevity and to protect everyone’s identity:

My daughter is 16, and she has saved her money to travel and volunteer.  She is partial to working with animals/conservation and/or children.  We have looked at a ridiculous number of programs, but we haven’t decided on any particular one.  She hasn’t traveled alone before, and she is sheltered, but she is completely consumed by the idea of traveling and volunteering.  I have discussed various tricky situations that she might encounter, but I don’t want to scare her away from an opportunity to learn and grow.  So many programs seem so helpful on the surface – like volunteering at orphanages or helping the elephants in Thailand – but there really can be a” dark underbelly” to many of these programs. I am just curious if you know of any reputable organizations that offer travel/volunteer trips for teens (even the sheltered ones). One program says its an elephant camp but it seems more like a theme park than a sanctuary. What advice would you give to a 16-year-old girl who wants to travel and “help and do something important”?  We are looking into local volunteer opportunities as well – she has volunteered at a local humane society, a non-profit movie theater, and done yard work/clean-up for a local YMCA camp.

Here’s what I wrote in response (also edited for my blog):

I’m going to be blunt, even harsh, and I am probably going to hurt your daughter’s feelings:

There are no reputable organizations serving children or animals abroad that need a 16-year-old from the USA. None. The programs she finds that say she will be able to help animals or children are going to be just what you said: “more like a theme park than a sanctuary.” Legitimate organizations serving children or animals in developing countries do not need 16 year olds – legitimate organizations serving children need certified and experienced teachers, school administrators, child psychologists, child nutritionists, etc., that speak the local language. Legitimate organizations serving animals need people with degrees and experience in wildlife biology and environments.

Many of pay-to-volunteer programs that say they help animals, such as elephants, capture animals specifically so they can make money from Westerners willing to pay big bucks for their feel good experience (and photos with the elephants they are “helping”.)

I’m assuming you’ve seen this: Reality Check: Volunteering Abroad / Internationally? This web page has the only pay-to-volunteer programs I’m willing to endorse.

If your daughter isn’t willing to use the next 6-10 years volunteering and working locally to get the experience she needs to work and volunteer abroad, and studying at least one other language in that time, then I recommend she forget trying to volunteer abroad and, instead, simply travel abroad and see some lovely sights, meet local people, maybe take some language classes, etc. But forget trying to help people while she’s traveling. Legitimate orphanages will NOT let her visit – just as in the USA, a foster home would never allow people to “come see the orphans”, this is the same policy for legitimate orphanages abroad. Sanctuaries that truly care about animals won’t let her interact with the animals either – while not in a developing country, the Elephant Sanctuary in Tennessee is a great example of this – people can volunteer on the site, but they are kept away from the elephants! That’s as it should be.

So, with all that said, if I were in your daughter’s place, what would *I* do, right now? These are all things I didn’t do, but wish I had, adapted somewhat for your daughter:

  • I would create a local project for a cause or community I believed in. I would learn just what it takes to create something that helps others, recruit people to help with it, lead it, overcome challenges, adapt plans, etc. And successful completion of a project would look great on my applications for university – and, eventually, the PeaceCorps – some day. I wrote this page of leadership volunteer project suggestions for Girl Scouts looking for ideas for their Gold Awards, but almost of any of them could be undertaken by anyone. Lots are animal-related, because, when I was young, that’s what I cared about (and still do).
  • I would do everything I could to learn a second language. I half-heartedly took Spanish classes in high school. I didn’t seriously try to learn Spanish until I was 35. If I’d really applied myself earlier – or taken French instead – I would be oh-so-much farther in my career now – I could have started this path so much earlier and there would be a massive amount of jobs I would now be qualified for that I’m not now.
  • I would have tried to do more locally what I dreamed of doing internationally. Your daughter has the Internet – she can use VolunteerMatch or Guidestar to find most of the nonprofits in your area. Forget whether or not they are looking for volunteers – look at the mission of these organizations. I would look for organizations that do the kind of work locally I want to do internationally, look at their web sites thoroughly, and then call or visit each – me, not my Mom – and ask if I could volunteer, and I would have an idea of what I wanted to do as a volunteer. So, if I wanted to help children, I would look for programs that mentor or tutor young people, and if I wasn’t old enough to be a mentor or tutor myself, I’d volunteer in the office just to see how things worked. Right here where I live now, in a small town in Oregon, there is a group, Adelante Mujeres, that is doing work locally that is exactly the same kind of work done by the United Nations overseas. If I wanted to help animals, I’d contact humane societies and animal rescue groups – the ideas I have about helping animals on that aforementioned “gold award” page represent all of the things I now wish I’d try to do when I was a teen to help animals.
  • I would research the three AmeriCorps programs – AmeriCorps State and National, AmeriCorps NCCC, and AmeriCorps VISTA – and I’d orientate myself into getting into one of them eventually, maybe even delaying college for a year to do one of the programs. NCCC takes people as young as 18 for their environmental projects – but you need to apply months in advance. There’s also this AmeriCorps summer program, which also accepts 18 year olds. Doing these programs greatly prepares you for eventually joining PeaceCorps, VSO, etc.

So, that’s my advice. If your daughter would like to talk further, she’s welcomed to email me.

A few things I didn’t write:

  • I’m a researcher and trainer regarding volunteer engagement. I’m also a humanitarian aid worker. Those two fields often clash when I get inquiries like this and, when they do, I almost always defer to the latter. For me, volunteering internationally should ALWAYS be about what local people and environments need and want, and that’s expertise from abroad, not young inexperienced people with a good heart. Hence why I can sound so harsh on this subject.
  • I have to admit I loathe emails from parents looking for volunteering opportunities for their children if those children are 16 or over. If your child wants to volunteer, without a parent, entirely on his or her own, that child should be able to write me directly and ask for advice him or herself. I’ve even had parents writing me for their children that are in their 20s, desperately needing community service hours for a drunk driving conviction. If your child can’t write me him or herself, he or she isn’t ready to volunteer without you right there onsite as well.
  • I’m a meanie.
  • I really do hope she takes my advice.

What got me into trouble with this young idealist was this web page of mine: transire benefaciendo: “to travel along while doing good”.

Also see:

The future of virtual volunteering? Deeper relationships, higher impact

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book coverIn May 2015, the book Volunteer Engagement 2.0 will be published by Wiley. The brainchild of VolunteerMatch, the book is meant to be a “what’s next” regarding volunteering, and features 35 different chapter contributors, including me.

I was asked to contribute a chapter on virtual volunteering and, initially, I said no. I said no at first for two reasons:

  1. Because, as Susan Ellis and I note in The LAST Virtual Volunteering Guidebook, virtual volunteering should not be a separate topic amid discussions about volunteer engagement and management. Instead, virtual volunteering needs to be fully integrated into all such discussions and trainings. No more segregation at the end of the book or workshop! If a book talks about recruiting volunteers, for instance, it needs to include how the Internet plays a role in this. If a workshop explores ways to recognize volunteers, it needs to include how to leverage online tools for this.
  2. Because virtual volunteering is NOT “what’s next” in volunteering: it is NOW. It’s a practice that’s more than 30-years-old. There were already so many organizations involving online volunteers back in the late 1990s I quit trying to count them!

I ultimately agreed, instead, to write a chapter on what I think is “what’s next” regarding virtual volunteering. And, as usual, I went against the grain: while everyone seems to be saying that microvolunteering is what most volunteers really want, I think there are a growing number of people that, instead, want more meaningful, high-responsibility, high-impact roles in virtual volunteering.

I focused my chapter on direct service virtual volunteering. Using a variety of asynchronous and synchronous Internet tools, this type of virtual volunteering includes:

  • Electronic visiting with someone who is home-bound, in a hospital or assisted living facility
  • Online mentoring and instruction, such as helping young students with homework questions or supporting adults learning a skill or finding a job
  • Teaching people to use a particular technology tool
  • One counseling by volunteers, such as staffing online crisis support lines
  • Facilitating online discussion groups for people with specific questions or needs, on childcare, organic gardening, travel to a particular area, or most any subject humans are capable of discussion
  • Offering legal, medical, business, or other expertise to clients
  • Working on a project together with clients and other volunteers as a part of meeting the organization’s mission, such as writing about the news of their neighborhood, school, or special interest group

When volunteers interact with clients directly, it’s a highly personal activity, no matter the mission of the organization. These volunteer roles involve building and maintaining trust and cultivating relationships – not just getting a task done. It takes many hours and a real commitment – it can’t be done just when the volunteer might have some extra time. And altogether, that means that, unlike microvolunteering, these direct service virtual volunteering roles aren’t available to absolutely anyone with a networked device, Internet access and a good heart. These roles discriminate: if you don’t have the skills and the time, you don’t get to do them. And, believe it or not, the very high bar for participation is very appealing to a growing number of people that want to volunteer.

Of course, I’m not opposed to microvolunteering – online tasks that take just a few minutes or hours for a volunteer to complete, require little or not training of the online volunteer, and require no ongoing commitment. I’ve been writing about microvolunteering before it was called that – I gave it the name byte-sized volunteering back in the 1990s, but the name didn’t stick. I think, if you want to give lots of people a taste of your organization or program, with an eye to cultivating those people into longer-term volunteers, and/or donors, and you have the time to create microvolunteering assignments, great, go for it!

But I am hearing and seeing a growing number of comments from people, especially young people, saying they want more than just a “quickie” volunteering experience. They want more than number-of-hours volunteering. They want more than a list of tasks that need done. They want something high-impact. They want to feel like they have really made a difference. They want to make a real connection with the organization and those, or the mission, it serves. They want a deep volunteering experience. I fear that, in the rush to embrace the microvolunteering buzz, we’re ignoring those people that want something more. My chapter in Volunteer Engagement 2.0 is my plea to not ignore those potential volunteers.

vvbooklittleHow to create both online microvolunteering tasks and high-responsibility online roles, including direct service with clients, and everything in between, as well as how to recruit and support volunteers for those roles, is fully explored, in great detail and with a lot of examples, in The LAST Virtual Volunteering Guidebook.

😉

 

UN Agencies: Defend your “internships”

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graphic by Jayne Cravens representing volunteersI love the United Nations, especially UNDP. I’ve been proud of my association with such in Germany, Afghanistan, Ukraine, and online. I hope to be associated with them again.

I am also a big advocate for internships, paid and unpaid, at the UN and other mission-based organizations.

But I’m bothered by many of the calls by UN agencies for unpaid interns to work 40 hours a week. And how many people are undertaking full-time unpaid internships at UN offices and have NOTHING about their terms of reference in writing at all.

Currently, formal recruitment messages from United Nations agencies for full-time unpaid interns talk about all of the tasks these volunteers – yes, volunteers, because they are UNPAID – will be responsible for, but rarely say what kinds of skills-development/career-development support an intern can expect. They also never say why these tasks have been deemed as most appropriate for an unpaid intern, as opposed to a paid consultant. I asked someone at a UN agency in an office where I was working why a particular role was designated for a full-time unpaid intern instead of a short-term, paid consultant or as a paid internship, and he said, “We don’t have the budget to pay someone.” Yes, I fumed. Involving volunteers – even if you call them unpaid interns – to save money is never the primary reason to involve such! NEVER. Unpaid interns are volunteers, and if you are involving them because you don’t have to pay them, you are, in fact, being exploitative.

If this keeps up, UN interns may use the dollar/Euro value of volunteer hours that UN Volunteers, IFRC, ILO & others are promoting to sue UN agencies for back pay – and there is growing legal precedent for them to do so (see the links at the end of this blog).

Also, think about how your full-time unpaid internships are limited to only certain economic classes, excluding some people because they can’t afford to give you that many unpaid service hours. Are you thinking about how to ensure a variety of qualified people can undertake unpaid internships with your organization, not just those that can afford to? One way to address this: make the internships only one or two days a week.

I established my own policy when I worked for the UN Volunteers programme in Germany that all staff in our department had to adhere to regarding involving unpaid interns. This was NOT an agency-wide policy, just the one I established for our department:

  • An internship had to have a primary focus on giving the intern a learning experience, not  getting tasks done. Therefore:
    • There had to be a written job description that reflected this primary purpose of the internship.
    • The intern was invited to all agency-wide staff meetings, all staff meetings for just our department, and encouraged to ask to attend staff meetings for other departments, to learn about work across the agency. Staff were encouraged to take interns with them to meetings or events whenever possible, as appropriate.
    • The intern also had one project that was uniquely his or hers, that he or she was responsible for and could put on his or her résumé (for instance, conducting a survey and writing up the results, or evaluating some process and making recommendations for improvement).
    • The intern received job coaching and job search help from other staff members.
  • Those considered for the internship had to be able to say why they wanted to enter into a profession related to our agency’s work, and say what they had done up to that point, in terms of education, volunteer work and paid work, to pursue that career choice.
  • A person could hold an internship only for up to six months. They absolutely could not hold it beyond six months, no exceptions. An intern could NOT return to our department as an intern again, ever. That reduced the chance of a person being exploited as free labor; it forced rotation in what was supposed to be a role reserved for people learning about our work, not the opportunity for someone to have an unpaid assistant indefinitely. Interns were, however, welcomed to apply for paid positions, and we did, indeed, hire former interns for short-term consultancies sometimes – but we never guaranteed that this would happen.
  • Ideally, the intern that was leaving would overlap with the intern that was coming in by one week, so that the departing intern could get experience training someone, documenting his or her responsibilities, etc. – experience which looks great on a CV.
  • When the intern left, he or she was interviewed about his or her experience as an intern from the point of view of getting the learning and professional development he or she was looking for, and this was used to continually improve internship involvement and to show if interns were getting what our internship promised: a learning experience.

The primary task our department at UNV reserved for interns was answering the many, many emails that came in regarding the Online Volunteering Service. We found that interns really were the best people for this task: in contrast to giving this task to employees, interns brought freshness and enthusiasm to responses that really shown through. They quickly saw patterns in questions or comments that a jaded staff person might not see, leading to adjustments to web site information and other communications. Also, in my opinion, because the interns were volunteers, they assumed a much stronger customer-advocate point-of-view regarding the people emailing with questions or comments than employees did; the agency could have a real siege-mentality outlook when dealing with anyone outside the organization, while the interns had a mentality of being advocates for those outside the organization.

As I mentioned, I also came up with tasks specifically for an intern to own. It might be an internal staff survey, a customer/client survey, a research project, an evaluation/analysis project, production of a report or online resource, etc. Every intern walked away something that was his or hers, a project that he or her directed or managed or lead, and that employees and other interns contributed to. That gave interns the management experience so many were desperate for.

One more piece of advice: create a mission statement for your office’s volunteer (unpaid staff) involvement and live it: state explicitly why your organization reserves certain tasks / assignments / roles for volunteers (including unpaid interns), to guide employees and volunteers in how they think about volunteers, to guide current volunteers in thinking about their role and value at the organization, and to show potential volunteers the kind of culture they can expect at your organization regarding volunteers. A commitment by UN offices to involve volunteers would be a wonderful thing – allowing people, particularly local citizens, to take on tasks and see first hand how an agency works that is meant to serve them, creating a sense of both ownership by citizens as well as a sense of transparency about the agency.

My other blogs on this GROWING internship controversy worldwide:

Note that the links within the aforementioned blogs may not work, as I moved all of my blogs from Posterous to WordPress a year or so ago, and it broke all of the internal links. Also, some web pages on other organization’s sites have moved since I linked to such, and I either don’t know or haven’t been able to find a new location for the material.

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Volunteers can help you reach more people on Facebook

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Most nonprofits, NGOs, government agencies and other mission-based organizations have taken a big hit regarding their social media outreach because of changes to Facebook’s newsfeed algorithm. These changes greatly affect how many people see a status update on a Facebook page that isn’t sponsored through paid advertising. That means that, even if people have “liked” your organization’s Facebook page, they won’t see most of what you post, because of how Facebook has newsfeeds configured now. According to the International Business Times, the reach for many Facebook pages posts was at about 16 percent, but over the last few months it’s down to 2 percent or less. Facebook is a for-profit company – they want you to pay for people to see your organization’s Facebook page posts.

I’ve read some comments from nonprofit managers that say they will stop updating their organization’s Facebook pages as a result. But Facebook is a primary communication method for oh-so-many people – to stop updating your organization’s page means you are cutting yourself off from current and potential volunteers, donors, clients, and other people who care about your mission.

In How a Few Tiny Horses Bucked the Facebook Algorithm, the nonprofit TechSoup does a great job of talking about what your nonprofit can do to greatly increase the number of people that see your Facebook page updates, and TechSoup profiles a small nonprofit that’s done it all with great success. I won’t repeat their recommendations here – but I will make an additional suggestion: involve volunteers in your efforts.

The TechSoup article talks about how much sharing images can increase your organization’s Facebook page reach. I can immediately hear so many people saying, “We don’t have any photos to share.” YES YOU DO. Or you should. Are volunteers taking photos during their service time and sharing those photos with you? You need to be encouraging volunteers to do this! And another volunteer can maintain the archive of these submissions, make sure photos have keywords so that they can easily be searched, etc., if your marketing staff has no time.

I hear someone saying, “We’re a domestic violence shelter. We can’t do this!” Yes, you can: a photo of a massive amount of dirty dishes in the sink, with the description, “Tonight, we fed more than 20 people staying at our shelter this evening.” A photo of hands holding each other, with a description about how your shelter is there to help. A photo of a group from the knees down. A photo of your Executive Director. A photo of artwork created by children at your shelter. I came up with that list in two minutes (I timed it). Imagine the ideas your volunteers could come up with that would allow photos that show impact or reflect your mission, but completely protect the identity of those you serve and of your volunteers.

The TechSoup article also talks about leveraging holidays, pop culture events, memes, “or even just plain old Friday. International days as designated by the United Nations is another good source for leveraging events or themes by others to generate content for your own Facebook page – these often come with ready-to-use logos, photos and keyword tags. Many of these posts that can be created days, weeks, even months in advance, and scheduled in advance to be posted by a tool like Hootsuite. This is another place that volunteers can be a huge help – most nonprofit marketing staff will tell you they don’t have time to leverage holidays, memes, UN days, etc. – so why not welcome volunteers to submit ideas? The marketing staff can still have final say on what will be posted, of course.

And, of course, ask your volunteers regularly to like your Facebook page status updates, to comment upon them, and to share them – this all leads to your page getting more viewers!

Involving volunteers in social media is, of course, yet another example of virtual volunteering!

Facebook’s days as a primary online communications tool are numbered, of course. It’s already been abandoned by millions of teens. Just as the dominant online tools America Online and MySpace ultimately fell out of favor with most users, so too will Facebook. But, for now, it’s worth sticking with.