A May 2022 report from VSO and Northumbria University in the UK says that changing how international and local volunteers work together, rather than eliminating the involvement of foreign volunteers abroad entirely, can decolonize humanitarian development, so that foreigners are no longer in control of decision-making and so that racist and discriminatory structures are addressed and dismantled.
The research, based on interviews and participatory workshops with volunteers, community representatives and VSO staff, found that there was no “one-size fits all” approach to designing and putting in place successful “volunteer combinations”. The report emphasizes that there is a need to adapt volunteer planning and management in programs based on local requirements and local learning.
The presence of international volunteers brings energy and donor attention to projects, whilst community and national volunteers enable effective engagement with local communities and increase the likelihood that impacts can be sustained due to their particular knowledges and longer-term involvement. However, there is no simple one-size-fits-all approach that can be applied to constructing a blend of volunteers, as the combination is dependent on the individuals within each blend, the environment around the project and the phasing of the work itself.
The report also warns that “community volunteers” – local volunteers, while crucial to the effectiveness of each blend, risk being sidelined.
I will always be fascinated by people at nonprofits, employees or volunteers, who will write a LONG post to an online forum about their lack of staffing for all that needs to be done or a safety issue regarding volunteers and clients, & when they read recommendations about how to address such, reply, Oh, yuck, bureaucracy… we’re non-traditional! We’re dynamic and nimble and get things done and rules are such a drag!
Being a dynamic, nimble startup nonprofit that GETS THINGS DONE! with NO RULES is lots of fun until volunteers start harassing clients or the executive director cries every night under all the stress and core volunteers quit because they just can’t anymore – and they aren’t replaced because the word is out about just how overwhelming volunteering can be.
Planning, policies and structure are NOT BAD THINGS. And they do NOT mean your organization can’t be dynamic and nimble and use all the latest jargon.
Put the mission of your program first, put your clients first, commit to quality, and remember that sometimes the reason for traditional ways of doing things is because traditional ways of doing things can WORK.
If you don’t have time to learn and apply the essentials, you’re being reckless with both volunteers and those they serve.
Foundations of Volunteer Engagement: Before you recruit volunteers, these are fundamental pieces that MUST be in place. If you choose not to do these and, instead, start recruiting volunteers right away, you are setting up your organization and those volunteers up for failure.
Support for Volunteers/Management of Volunteers & Safety Considerations: All of the resources I have regarding the support for and management of volunteers, as well as safety in engaging volunteers, are on one page because I believe they are inextricably linked – it’s impossible to separate these two issues. Also, I believe that these MUST be explored and drafted BEFORE you start recruiting volunteers.
Creating Roles & Tasks for Volunteers: A key to retaining volunteers is having roles and tasks well-defined and IN WRITING, so that expectations are clear. This is yet another step to undertake BEFORE you start recruiting volunteers – and if you don’t, don’t be surprised when you can’t keep volunteers and your volunteer engagement flounders.
Ethics in Volunteerism & Court-Ordered Community Service: If your organizations involves volunteers, you should also be thinking regularly about the ethics of such. Involving people who are not financially compensated for work that they do carries with it regular questions and criticisms. Exploring ethics in volunteerism has not won me many friends. Exploring ethics in volunteerism can help you avoid public relations disasters later.
Harumph.
Note: I will be quite hard to reach from Monday, June 20 through Wednesday, June 29. I will be checking email and social media only sporadically in that time.
High turnover of volunteers at a nonprofit, NGO, community program, etc., usually is not a good thing. But I hear nonprofits often talk about how they don’t want to lose any volunteers, or how they see a large number of volunteers leaving as an automatically negative thing.
No volunteer is forever. People’s lives change: they get married, get divorced, have babies, get new jobs, move, have a change in their health, have new caregiving responsibilities, develop new interests and on and on. Their interests also change: they may decide they want to do something that your organization doesn’t offer – work with animals, develop web sites, mentor young people, do outdoor service projects – and all of those changes are fine and normal.
Absolutely, you should do exit interviews when a volunteer formally quits, and surveys of former volunteers that stopped signing up to help, to find out if there is an issue you need to address. And if you see a problem – complaints about a toxic work environment, or volunteers being asked to do too much, or volunteer burnout – you need to address those.
But some volunteering turnover should not only be expected, it should often be welcomed. Volunteer cliques don’t welcome new members and exclude volunteers that are different than the clique’s status quo – so if you have a lot of long-term volunteers, is it really a sign that you do a great job of supporting and engaging volunteers or is it that you’ve created or enabled an unwelcoming clique of volunteers? How volunteers do what they do needs to evolve with the times: there are approaches that worked previously that don’t now, and new approaches that need to be considered and explored – is your lack of turnover really a sign of stagnation of ideas and methods?
I saw this message posted to social media from someone talking about an event that is staffed primarily by volunteers.
Longtime volunteers feel pride & ownership in what they do (which is generally great). But because they feel ownership, they dismiss any suggestion to change anything they do, even when that would help the event & the organization.
I’ve heard this complaint by managers of volunteers for many nonprofit initiatives, especially animal shelters, thrift stores and rural firehouses. Volunteer ownership is a blessing for the commitment and responsibility it can inspire, but it also can be a curse, for the inflexibility and unwelcomeness it can cultivate.
Maybe it’s not such a bad thing if you lose some volunteers because you introduced more thorough safety policies, or because the volunteers wanted to rally around a volunteer who was dismissed for sexually-harassing clients or other volunteers. Maybe it’s not such a bad thing if you lose some volunteers because you now require them to go through a training to better protect and serve clients. Maybe it’s not such a bad things to lose some volunteers who don’t like your new focus on inclusion and diversity. Maybe it’s not such a bad thing if you lose some volunteers who are opposed to all change and like to say, “But we’ve always done it THIS way…”
Do you think some annual turnover of volunteers at a nonprofit might actually be a good thing? Comment below.
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Years ago, I was a part of an online community for humanitarian aid and development workers. It wasn’t a group for the sharing of best practices or professional development. It was a group for venting and kvetching.
The group didn’t last long in that form – as the group became more and more popular and new members came in, venting started to be frowned on, because of the expectation of such workers to always be positive took over – as it always does in the offline world. The snarky commenters were shamed into silence and the group became yet another boring, rarely-controversial discussion group for best practices and where to find jobs and funding.
One of my favorite times on the group were when conversations would break out about eyebrow-raising comments that came from funders. I loved the comments so much, I saved many of them. I just found them as I was cleaning out a hard drive and decided to share my favorites. No actual humanitarian groups or donors are named here.
These are reported to be actual comments humanitarian workers have gotten from foreign funders:
For the household disinfection kit you are proposing, could you please explain the purpose of the mop? I mean, I know people use it to clean their house, but could you write a justification to that effect?
Email conversation: Funder: “Hey, can you include some photos of children. They usually look good for fundraising”. Agency: “No. I cannot.” Funder: “Why not?” Agency “Because the project is NOT about children”.
Funder: “When refurbishing the health facility, ensure that a maximum of 2 coats of paint is used”.
After sending a very long and detailed report (according to the donor’s format and per their request), including photos showing the progress of each activity, I got this email response: “Hi. Can you give me some quick updates on the project?”
Funder, regarding the alphabetization component of a rural development program: “Why would women living in the desert need to learn how to read and write anyway?”
Funder: “We don’t understand why you want to do contingency activities due to increased fighting. Could you just solve the conflict?”
Funder: “Why do they need a gravity-fed spring water system? Don’t they have normal tap water?”
Funder said they would rather spend $200 US per day renting cars for a five-year project rather than actually buying cars, which would be far cheaper, “because we don’t support the purchase of assets.”
Funder, at our first meeting: “I thought you would be a man.”
I submitted a very long, detailed research report for a donor. Got it returned with feedback. Throughout the 120-page report there is a comment from the funder, stating “you should mention xyz government and UN report here.” The comments were given at least 20-30 times, and the comments got angrier and angrier throughout the report because we’d missed such an important document. Me in follow-up call with the donor: “I have searched all of the documents you sent that you wanted us to include and the Internet, I can’t find xyz report.” Donor: “It hasn’t been released yet.” Me: “errrrmmmm… Could you send me a copy? That way I would be able to mention its contents” (and actually know it exists which obviously I didn’t before). Donor: “I don’t have a copy.” Me: “errmmmmm… have you even read it?” Donor: “No, I just heard about it.”
Funder: “So are you actually a spy for the British Government?” Worker: (nervous, confused) “No, I am sure my Government considers me far too troublesome to employ” (i.e. sweary with an inability to toe the line), “Why?” Funder: “How else would a woman end up working in Mine Action here?”
Donor: “We are paid for a children’s rights project. We cant support you in a nutritional crisis.”
Had a potential donor call me at 3 AM local time, when I was helping with first response after a disaster, to say that they had decided that they wanted their aid to go to providing shelter to orphans and could my organization do that? At 3 AM, I had to explain that nobody knew which children were orphans as yet because they were still determining who had died, and that the first option would be to reunite children with extended family members rather than create a separate facility. They were noticeably displeased during this call. I clearly did not understand their humanitarian impulse to help ORPHANS. They didn’t give us the money.
Funder: “These photos don’t show a reality that would reflect the need for the kind of assistance you’re asking for. Do you have photos that more obviously show the effects of food insecurity and mass migration?” Many words for: put in images of starving children 🙄. For the record; the photos we provided were of adult women who had consented to having their photos taken.
As for myself, I had to help a colleague explain to the representative of a very large, well-known tech agency that Africa is not a country and that not everyone spoke English there.
If you have benefited from this blog, my other blogs, or other parts of my web site and would like to support the time that went into researching information, developing material, preparing articles, updating pages, etc. (I receive no funding for this work), here is how you can help.
