Category Archives: Career advice

Training opportunities are all around you

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If you are in the Portland, Oregon area, here is a great training opportunity: DIY TeamWorks, a program by Hands On Greater Portland, gives participants the opportunity to investigate Do-It-Yourself community projects related to mending clothes, growing plants, remodeling houses, cooking, or making crafts in the North/Northeast Portland area. The DIY initiatives that the Hands On Greater Portland program will focus on encourage people to make goods themselves rather than buy mass produced items, to create quality items (“better made”), to recycle, and to reduce waste. The DIY TeamWorks sessions combine DIY-oriented volunteer projects with educational materials to help participants better understand the “why” of DIY, and ways they might want to incorporate DIY approaches to their own organizations and programs, or in their individual lives. TeamWorks teams consist of approximately 10-14 individuals, led by a Hands On trained volunteer leader. These team members commit to volunteering for every project in the series, so check your schedule before signing up. When you sign-up for the first project, you are registering to participate in the entire TeamWorks experience.

Why is this a great training opportunity:

  • If you work in a program focused on children, on people re-entering the workforce, on immigrants, on victims of domestic violence, or on any population that could benefit from learning DIY projects, your training in this initiative could lead to the creation of a new program at your organization, or, at least, some new activities.
  • If you are an environmental organization, you could use this training to help your staff and volunteers become better advocates of DIY among your clients, customers and the general public.
  • If you work in a government housing project, you could use this training to develop programs for the residents with whom you work.
  • It could eventually lead to a partnership in some way between you and any of the organizations you encounter through this program.
  • If you want to work at any of the aforementioned types of organizations, this training would not only bump up your résumé, it would also help you get to know nonprofits in the area.

These kinds of training opportunities at nonprofit organizations abound: Girl Scouts offers training in leadership, event management and other areas, and many training activities for volunteer programs at various organizations give you knowledge you can use in the work place – someone who is trained in crisis counseling, for instance, may get noticed among a stack of job applications, because it will be seen as an ability to identify and help stressed co-workers. There is often a small fee associated with any of these trainings through nonprofit organizations, but the fees are more than affordable.

And that leads me to start thinking about volunteering itself as skills development for the work place, but that’s another blog…

Advanced Volunteer Management Retreat in New Zealand May 25-27, 2011

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The 2011 Australasian Retreat for Advanced Volunteer Management will be held in New Zealand for the first time, in partnership with Volunteering New Zealand. The retreat takes place May 25 to 27, 2011 in Wellington.

If you are working with volunteers in New Zealand, there’s no question that you should look into attending this conference. People working with volunteers in Australia, Papua New Guinea, East Timor, Indonesia, Malaysia, the Philippines, or anywhere else in the region should also consider attending this conference. But note that this conference is not open to just anyone: this is an advanced retreat, limited to just 52 participants who have a minimum two year of ‘hands on’ experience managing volunteer programs.

Accepted attendees must agree to attend the retreat in its entirety. If you wish to attend, you fill out an online application via the web site, which will be vetted by an independent panel of managers of volunteers. In most cases, a decision will be made about a person’s attendance within 72 hours of submitting an application. The application asks questions about what you want to learn at the retreat, what specific experiences, skills or resources you have to offer others at the retreat, what would you like to gain from the retreat, etc.

I really cannot emphasize enough the advanced nature of this retreat:

    • This isn’t how do I recruit volunteers. This is how have you created a diverse volunteer corps? How do you reach new groups as volunteers? Here’s what I’ve tried myself.

 

    • This isn’t I don’t have enough time to use the Internet to support and involve volunteers and am tired of people telling me I should do it. This is here is what I am already doing to use the Internet to support and involve volunteers. What are you doing? What works? What doesn’t?

 

    • This isn’t what should be on my volunteer application? This is what might I be doing that’s turning great volunteers away from my organization? Do I need to change the way that I work?

 

    • This isn’t how do I say thank you to volunteers? This is how do I move volunteers into critical roles that involve decision-making at my organization?

 

  • This isn’t give me the safe, easy, quick way to deal with this volunteer management issue. This is push my boundaries, give me new ways of thinking, challenge me, scare me, inspire me! 

There are discussions. There are disagreements. Tears may be shed. But there is also a lot of laughter, a lot of ah ha! moments, lots of encouragement. If you are ready for the next level of volunteer engagement, this retreat is for you.

There is nothing like this retreat in the USA, unfortunately. Which is particularly sad since I believe that organizations in the USA are doing the most innovative, exciting things regarding the involvement of volunteers in the world. But there is no conference here in the USA that captures and shares those innovative experiences; our volunteerism conferences are the usual, with corporations telling nonprofits how they should operate, celebrities talking about all the great volunteering they do, large, traditional organizations talking about experiences and resources that aren’t at all possible for small nonprofits, and everyone having the same old same old discussions. Conflict is avoided, debates discouraged.

I was honored to be the keynote speaker at this advanced retreat last year in Australia, and to then travel across the country presenting intensive workshops on trends in volunteer management, diversifying volunteer ranks, and, ofcourse, using the Internet to support and involve volunteers. Here are my blogs from that experience, which reflect the level of discussions that happen at the retreat “down under”:

What it is like to be a consultant

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A frequently-asked question to me is, “What is it like to be a consultant? How can I be one?”

I’ve offered what advice I can, like about how to telecommute/work from home and how to pursue a career in humanitarian activities, but today, I’ll share a Friday funny that shows what it’s often like from a financial standpoint to be a consultant (thanks to Martin Cowling for the heads up):

Video

Children in the USA should learn a 2nd language – but it shouldn’t have to be Spanish

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Most of the time, I agree with Nicholas Kristof of The New York Times. But I think his recent column Primero Hay Que Aprender Español. Ranhou Zai Xue Zhongwen. (First learn Spanish. Then study Chinese) misses the mark hugely. His proclaiming that “Every child in the United States should learn Spanish” gets people’s hackles up, and anything that comes after a statement like that isn’t going to be taken well, even if the reasons for recommending Spanish as a second language are good ones.

I chose to study Spanish in high school. For me, ultimately, it has turned out not to be the best choice for a second language, either personally or professional. I work internationally, and I know now that French would have served me far, far better. But back in the 1980s, my mother kept telling me, “They only speak French in France.” And I was just a small town girl from Kentucky – what did I know? I believed her. When I moved to Germany, I resumed studies in Spanish when found that my employer, the UN, offered free classes in such, forgoing not only French, but German as well (I thought I would be in Germany for only a year or two). And it was only after a couple of years I realized just how much I had handicapped myself by my second language choice, both personally and professionally. Most of my colleagues at the UN in Germany spoke French, most Africans I met (and continue to meet) speak French before English, and most international workers I have worked with outside of Germany speak French as a second language. Had I learned French, I would probably still be living in Europe; I certainly would have a full time job with an international development agency by now.

I ended up living in Germany for eight years, marrying my husband, a German. When a few years later my husband and I traveled throughout Eastern Europe, almost everyone spoke German – it’s by far the most popular second language among anyone working in the tourism industry in most of Europe. Germans seem to be everywhere in the world, and I would have had endless opportunities to speak German over the years outside of Germany — but Spanish, not so much. German would have not only served me well living in Germany, it would have served me well in my travels.

Even Arabic would have been a better second language choice for me than Spanish. Persian Farsi or Dari would have been a better second language choice for me than Spanish.

Spanish has not been a worthless investment at all, and I don’t at all want to imply that I’m saying it’s not a good second language choice for someone in the USA. Knowing Spanish (well, at least a bit) has brought me some benefits: I had a wonderful time in Spanish classes at the UN, as well as my intensive classes in Avila, Spain. My Mexican neighbors here in Oregon seem to appreciate my attempts to communicate. In Romania, on a rare evening when we stayed somewhere that didn’t have anyone that spoke German, I was able to secure a room in a guest house where the owner spoke some Spanish. There was one Afghan-American guy in my office in Kabul who spoke Spanish, and it was fun to say something to him and watch my colleagues stare at us in confusion. My German mother-in-law speaks some Spanish, and it’s fun to speak it with her and leave my husband out of the conversation. And I have many friends from Spain who really appreciate my language skills.

Again, I don’t at all want to imply that I’m saying Spanish is not a good second language choice. I’m sure it’s going to serve me professionally at some point in the future, and that’s why I’m going to continue to cultivate my skills in such. But a lot of factors go into a parent’s selection of their child’s second language, everything from their ethnic or cultural heritage to the neighborhood where they live to their career hopes. Spanish is, indeed, the best choice as a second language for most native English-speaking American children. But it is not automatically the best choice for ALL children.

What’s more important than Kristof’s idea of requiring every American to choose Spanish as a second language: I could totally get behind requiring that every American child both master English and learn a second language, whatever that second language is. Americans are getting their butts kicked in the global marketplace by other countries, where even the working class speaks at least two languages. In the USA, the tragedy isn’t that rich parents are choosing Chinese as their child’s second language; it’s that learning any second language is reserved almost exclusively for only rich school districts and private schools.

And I’ll end with this: my German husband is on a business trip right now. He’s in China.