Daily Archives: 3 April 2019

Volunteering to build community cohesion

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One of the reasons I loathe the way the Points of Light Foundation and other organizations promote the value of volunteering – with a monetary value and number of hours – is because it ignores the far greater value of volunteering and the far better reasons for an organization to engage volunteers.

I’ll say it yet again: engaging volunteers isn’t always just to get a task done. Sometimes, volunteering has much larger, more important goals – like a group volunteering effort done to help demonstrate solidarity and understanding between different groups. Volunteers can help build community cohesion and better community understanding. Volunteers can help change minds – without ever asking volunteers to change their minds.

Do you really think the best, most efficient, cheapest way to build affordable housing is by gathering a different group of volunteers each day to build a house together? No – no, it’s not. If that’s why you think Habitat Humanity does what it does, you are REALLY missing the larger point of their mobilization of volunteers.

Here’s yet another example of what I mean when I go on this regular tirade: in Washington County, Oregon, members of an Islamic mosque’s congregation and members of a Jewish temple’s congregation got together to volunteer for a Habitat for Humanity build project in November 2018. Here’s a tweet about the event, with a photo:

This happens all the time, all across the USA. Habitat chapters LOVE bringing together different groups to volunteer side-by-side. Is the value of that the number of hours they volunteered and the monetary value of those hours? No.

If your organization is recruiting volunteers just to get tasks done, you are missing out on the value of volunteers.

And on a side note: four months later, this tweet had only two “likes” and no retweets. Every person on the build site should have been invited to retweet and “like” this if they are on Twitter. Every staff person at Habitat with a Twitter account should have been invited to retweet and “like” this. Don’t post something as wonderful as this and hope it might get noticed – ask your staff and volunteers, including your board members, to share it! Here’s more advice on using social media.

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