Category Archives: Community / Volunteer Engagement

Still trying to volunteer, still frustrated

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Back in February 2012, I wrote a blog called I’m a Frustrated Volunteer. It was about how often people try to volunteer but run up into so many roadblocks: incomplete, hard-to-understand information on the organization’s web site, lack of followup by the organization after the person expresses interest, no clear direction or support when they are trying to complete a volunteering task, etc. So often, when organizations, especially schools, tell me they can’t find volunteers, the problem is, in fact, they are turning potential volunteers away per the aforementioned challenges.

In that blog, I admitted that the frustrated volunteer wannabe I was describing was, in fact, ME, based on my experiences trying to volunteer oh-so many times since September 2009, when I moved back to the USA – Oregon, specifically. I noted that the upside with all this frustration was that my own attempts to volunteer had made me a better consultant and better manager regarding volunteer engagement, and the experience had generated a lot of new resources on my web site. Those experiences as a frustrated volunteer also influenced my writing of The Last Virtual Volunteering Guidebook.

It’s six years after that blog. Am I still a frustrated volunteer?

Yes. Yes, I am.

Here are some experiences I’ve had in trying to volunteer over the last few years:

  • I wanted to volunteer at the local high school. I was ready to help with their drama club, their speech team, or any other club or class where my expertise might help the students. The home page for the school doesn’t even have the word volunteer on it. Once you find the page for potential volunteers, it has just three paragraphs: no information about what volunteers do, the minimum amount of commitment required, etc. The lead statement is “Our volunteers contribute more than $1.6 million worth of help each year — the equivalent of about 12 extra hours of adult time for every student in the district.” Yes, that’s right – volunteers are great because it means the school doesn’t have to hire people to do that work! Next…
  • I wanted to explore volunteering with a local public service agency that supposedly involves volunteers in auxiliary support roles for staff engaged in a very intense activity. The web site has no info about this auxiliary, though I’m sure it exists. I wrote the person who is in charge of agency’s more labor-intensive, time-intensive volunteering. He wrote back and said he had some PDFs he could share with me about the program – but offered no summary of what the program was about, the application process, etc., and certainly no encouragement – I felt like I was bothering him. And why isn’t this information on the web site? He never said why. Next…
  • I’ve wanted to volunteer to help girls go camping or to become leaders or to use tech both safely and to explore careers, but Girl Scouts doesn’t do those kinds of activities where I live, and another group that I thought did those things never got back to me after my TWO applications to volunteer. Next…
  • I was interested in volunteering at a nearby jail to help people regarding résumé writing, finding volunteering after incarceration in order to build community ties and skills, interviewing skills, etc. But when I tried, I was told a religious-based organization was in charge of all of these volunteering activities, and I would need to contact that religious-based organization. I am not of that religion – in fact, I am not religious at all, and I felt like I wouldn’t be welcomed because I’m not religious and wouldn’t be helping from a faith-based motivation. I submitted my application, but I never heard anything back from the church in charge of the program. Next…

What volunteering has worked out for me?

  • There’s a woman in the town where I live who is trying to start a nonprofit, and I’ve been able to help her with by-laws, writing a mission statement and other basic requirements.
  • I still help Bpeace on occasion as an online volunteer. And, BTW, Bpeace is awesome – check them out.
  • I signed up online to help at a forum for candidates running for a particular office. I ended up being the greeter at the sign-in table, something that I actually really enjoy. I wasn’t given much guidance – good thing I’ve worked a LOT of registration tables over the years. But it was over in just three hours. No more candidate forums until the Fall, before the November election.
  • I’m still volunteering online with TechSoup, contributing information to their community forum.
  • I’m serving on a citizens’ committee for public safety in the town where I live; after a year, the committee has come up with exactly zero recommendations to police and fire or the city council regarding safety in our town, and other committee members have balked at my ideas regarding pedestrian and bicyclist safety. Still, she persisted…

Online volunteering is super easy to find, as always, and I love it. But I continue to be frustrated in my attempts to be an onsite volunteer in activities that I feel a personal passion about. And I know that this is a chronic problem. Wouldn’t it be great if, instead of campaigns to get people to volunteer, we had funding and training for nonprofits, public sector agencies and schools about how to appropriately on-board and engage volunteers?

So, what volunteers has your initiative been turning away?

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Volunteers themselves speaking out about voluntourism

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There are few things more cringeworthy than watching 20 British schoolgirls trying to build a well under the scalding Nepalese heat. This is what I imagine a group of local men were thinking as they politely stood back while we puzzled our way through this contraption. The orphans peered through the windows, somewhat accustomed to this strange set-up. An unnecessary number of hours later, a ceremony took place thanking us for our hard work. We had singlehandedly brought clean water to this poor, desperate orphanage. We could fly home better people.

This scathing comment is from an editorial called DUCK expeditions are a load of quack published in the Palatinate, the official student newspaper of Durham University in the UK. The blog is an honest account of voluntourism by someone who, as a young teen, went abroad, thinking she her good heart but complete lack of expertise was what a poor community abroad needed and wanted. I applaud her for coming forward when she realized what her voluntourism experience had really been, in terms of helping and impact abroad.

In addition, via link on Reddit, I found a blog from 2015, by a young woman in Germany whose hope for a voluntourism experience to help turtles actually became torture for them:

“The ‘turtle conservation program’ was shut down after the police came (there is a law in Fiji to protect turtles as they are threatened by extinction). A girl made a… ehh… Let’s say critical Facebook post. I think ‘inhuman’ and ‘animal torture’ were some of the words she used… I’m just glad that I got my money back without any problem because I know about 7 people who had to go to court to get some of their money back because the agencies made a lot of great promises without keeping them. What they offer is not really volunteer work, here they call it voluntourism. A lot of money which doesn’t actually help anybody but just finances the international agencies. I got quite disillusioned about volunteering here. I left the volunteer house as soon as possible and went to a resort. The turtles were set free, but they are probably dead because they have been in the tank for too long and weren’t able to survive anymore. I’m so sorry for them.”

I did reach out to the author and, indeed, she exists and this was her experience. In an email to me last month, she noted:

I must say that I really regret not following through on that whole thing after I got the full amount back. I should have addressed that magazine to publish the whole story or the topic, or at least have given public critics, but I was 18, alone in Fiji and everything was very exciting… I was just too distracted with all that comes with starting university. So I am happy to hear that somebody actually does address that topic…

I appreciate these young people speaking out – it’s NOT easy. These are people who really did want to do the right thing, and while their attempt at voluntourism ended up being wasteful or even destructive, their voice now IS doing the right thing, and I applaud them.

But it’s not just people who paid to volunteer who are speaking out – it’s also people who were exploited:

The support of orphanages has created a thriving industry in which children are separated from their families and subjected to terrible abuse and neglect, as I was — being used as a commodity to generate funding… Having these adults coming in and out of our lives felt like we were continuously being abandoned.

This statement is from Sinet Chan, who grew up in a Cambodian orphanage and has pleaded with Australians not to donate to or volunteer at orphanages. Her quote is from this article about the push in Australia to make ‘orphanage tourism’ illegal.

I’m not letting up on this issue. The ability to pay and having a good heart should NOT qualify someone to hold orphans and take selfies in Africa, or wash elephants, or hand out food to refugees. If you want to help abroad, then get involved locally; you shouldn’t feel that you have the expertise to do something abroad – work with at-risk youth, help animals, help refugees, etc. – unless you have experience doing it locally, in your own country, preferably in your own community.

There is such a thing as effective short-term international volunteering. And it is NOT impossible to break into humanitarian work. And caring about people and animals abroad is a great quality to have. But taking action abroad needs to come from a place from respect and knowledge.

July 8, 2018 update: My consulting colleague and all-around amazing human Dr. Erin Barnhardt wrote about her own experience as a pay-to-volunteer-abroad experience in her 2012 PhD thesis, Engaging Global Service: Organizational Motivations for and Perceived Benefits of Hosting International Volunteers. She notes in the introduction to her research:

While my experience in Jordan was on the whole overwhelmingly positive, I was surprised and somewhat disappointed to discover that I was in fact a largely ineffective volunteer. I knew that staying for only two weeks meant that my contributions would be severely limited and that my lack of Arabic language skills would further hamper my impact, but I’d assumed that coming in with a professional expertise meant that I could make some kind of lasting contribution during my very short tenure. What I discovered though was, despite having gone through a reputable volunteer-sending organization to an organization that regularly hosted international volunteers, the infrastructure to put me to work was minimal and somewhat ad hoc. I came to the Jordanian NGO with a genuine interest in helping out, only to discover that there was in fact little for me to do.

I so appreciate Erin’s honesty – and the honesty of all people who have paid-to-volunteer abroad and are now speaking out about it.

July 16, 2018 update: When volun-tourism isn’t all it’s cracked up to be’ – ‘It was pretty much a zoo’: The conditions came to light by Amanda Rowland, 21, an upset and unhappy volunteer who had paid over $3000 to visit the centre in in Malaysia for a month in January. Amanda had been sold the trip as a chance to work at a temporary holding facility for orangutans rescued from illegal possession.

May 31, 2019: Chase and JP Morgan has a commercial to encourage financial planning that promotes volunteerism with wildlife: a happy couple gushes about their volunteer trip abroad scrubbing elephants’ feet and further gush how they would like to make that trip every year from now on, and their financial advisor is happy to oblige. So disappointing to see these two companies promote such a highly unethical and harmful practice!

My other blogs on this subject:

Recognizing university sports players for their community service

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If you follow sports in the USA, then you have heard of all-star teams and all-conference teams –  but how about a Community Service Team honor?

The Southeastern Conference is a governing body for more than a dozen universities in the Southern USA: the University of Alabama, University of Arkansas, University of Auburn, University of Florida, Georgia, University of Kentucky, Louisiana State University, the University of Mississippi, Mississippi State University, University of Missouri, University of South Carolina, University of Tennessee, Texas A&M University and Vanderbilt University. I just found out that, each year, the SEC chooses a “Community Service Team” of basketball players from among SEC schools – a men’s team and a women’s team. At a different time, they do the same regarding football. The honor goes to players in recognition of their off-the-court/off-the-field volunteering and community service activities. Like an all-conference team or an all-state team, the Community Service Team is a hypothetical team – the members won’t actually get together and play a game.

I’m from Kentucky, so I’ve grown up with SEC teams. The SEC Women’s Basketball Community Service Team for 2018 includes Makenzie Cann of Lawrenceburg, Kentucky and a junior at UK. She has volunteered more than 150 hours at the Lexington Humane Society working with the marketing and fundraising team, spent time building houses and a local park with Habitat for Humanity, visited with children at the UK Children’s Hospital and Breakfast with Santa program, has packed backpacks of food for local kids, has volunteered at several local elementary schools afterschool program and spent an afternoon at the local YMCA playing basketball with kids.

This year’s SEC Men’s Basketball Community Service Team includes Dillon Pulliam from Cynthiana, Kentucky and a sophomore at UK. He volunteered in a telethon to support victims of Hurricane Harvey, a food backpack program, a mission trip to Belize, as a counselor in the UK basketball camp and been a guest speaker at a local elementary school.

I wish these players got even half as much attention for this honor as for their university team winning the SEC conference tournament or the NCAA tournament!

Also see:

My favorite Super Bowl moment: NFL Man of the Year

Trump wants to eliminate national service

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On February 12, 2018, the President of the USA, Donald Trump, sent his official Fiscal Year 2019 Budget request to Congress. This budget proposes the elimination of the Corporation for National and Community Service in FY 2019, and provides funding for an “orderly shutdown.” Here is an official statement about this budget proposal from CNCS.

This budget cut will mean the elimination of AmeriCorps, VISTA, Conservation Corps (the modern-day CCC) and Senior Corps.

I have seen, first hand, the impact that these national service members have had on nonprofit and public institutions, and those they serve, across this nation. These programs are a part of what make my country great – great right now. Members of these services provide CRITICAL services that benefit millions of people in our country. Members go on to an intense awareness about community issues that make them better citizens, more educated votes, and more productive members of society. The first President George Bush, President Bill Clinton, the second President George Bush, and President Barack Obama all supported these national service programs. If these national service programs are eliminated, millions will suffer, and yet another great thing about these United States will go away.

I am being entirely politically slanted with this blog and begging every person in the USA to write their US Senators and US Congressional representatives to stand firm in support of national service programs and to pressure their colleagues to do the same. We cannot let these programs be cut.

I warned you of this a year ago: AmeriCorps, VISTA, other CNCS programs could soon be gone

In the meantime, I guess it’s time to scramble volunteers to preserve the research and resources CNCS has compiled on its web site before the government deletes it.

Also see:

Diagnosing the causes of volunteer recruitment problems

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graphic by Jayne Cravens representing volunteersI see it and hear it over and over: comments from nonprofits or churches or schools saying they are having trouble recruiting volunteers.

Before you hire a consultant, even me, to see what the problem is regarding why you don’t have enough volunteers, you might be able to diagnosis the problem yourself. The only catch is that you MUST be honest as you answer these questions. Also, answering these questions is rarely a one-person exercise; you may think you know the answer, but you need to ask other staff members, including volunteers themselves, what their answers are to these assessment questions. Don’t be surprised if your receptionist or a volunteer gives you a very different answer to any of these questions than you yourself would give.

Questions to diagnose your volunteer recruitment problems:

  • Is it easy to know just from looking at your web site what volunteers do, the different roles, the time commitment, the training requirements, and how to sign up?
  • Is there an OBVIOUS link from your home page to information for potential volunteers, a link as obvious as your donation link?
  • When someone calls or emails about volunteering, or submits an application, does that person get an immediate reply regarding next steps? In fact, do they get info at all, or does someone take their name and say someone will get back to them and then, most of the time, no one ever does? Often, when I’ve been asked to assess a volunteer recruitment at a school, THIS is where the problem lies: plenty of people are calling to volunteer, but they never get the response they need to get started, or the response comes months later, when they are no longer interested or available.
  • Are your next steps for volunteering with your organization something that the volunteer can get started on in a few days? In several weeks? In a few months? The further away the next step, the more likely the volunteer candidate won’t follow through.
  • Are your volunteering opportunities listed at the most popular third party volunteering sites for your area? For instance, where I live, the most popular volunteer recruitment sites are VolunteerMatch and HandsOn Portland. Go to Google or Bing and type in volunteer and the name of your city and see what comes up. Also see these tips for Using Third Party Web Sites Like VolunteerMatch to Recruit Volunteers.
  • Do you need to alter the volunteer role so that a volunteer would get more out of it, in terms of training, career-development, university class credit, or personal fulfillment? Is there anything you can do to make the role more fun?
  • Can the people you are trying to recruit as volunteers afford to volunteer – to work for free? Do they have childcare responsibilities that are preventing them from helping? Could you offer childcare? Could you pay for parking or mass transit, provide lunch for volunteers, or do anything at all to ease their financial burden?
  • Could you make the service time commitment less for volunteers? Could you try to recruit more volunteers for shorter shifts, for instance, instead of fewer volunteers for longer shifts?
  • Do you have a myriad of opportunities available for volunteers, like Short-term Assignments for Tech Volunteers, One-Time, Short-Term Group Volunteering Activities, and virtual volunteering?
  • Does the task you are asking volunteers to do seem especially intimidating or daunting? Could you make it less so, by reducing the time commitment the volunteer would have to make, or by guaranteeing that there is a seasoned volunteer or employee always with the new volunteer? Or by taking away the tasks in the role that are the most intimidating and giving them to paid staff? Or by better-assuring candidates that they will be fully trained before they are put into potentially challenging situations?
  • Are you asking too much from volunteers in terms of a time commitment, training and the responsibilities they will undertake as unpaid staff? Do you need to convert such roles into paid positions, in order to better attract the people that can make the time and emotional commitment to the role?

A terrific, easy exercise that can be really helpful in diagnosing your volunteer recruitment problems is to create a flow chart mapping your volunteer engagement, or a series of maps for different parts of the volunteer management process — the volunteer in-take process, the volunteer assignment development and matching process, the volunteer support assignment, etc. You could do charts for each of these processes, and then show how they all intersect. You can do a map on what you do, and don’t do, now, and then alter it to show how it SHOULD be. A dry erase white board with markers is best, better than any computer app:

Here’s one example of what a volunteer in-take flow chart could look like as a result of your mapping exercise (every organization is different):

Let’s be clear: people WANT to volunteer, including the much-derided millennials. Just go to Quora or Reddit and see how many people, mostly from that generation, are posting questions about how to find volunteering. And people are hungry to connect: in this age of always-online, there are so many, many people looking to connect in a meaningful way offline. Your obstacle to recruiting volunteers isn’t that people don’t want to volunteer; it’s that people that want to volunteer can’t easily find your information, or your volunteer roles don’t fit their interests or schedules. What worked to recruit volunteers 30 years ago doesn’t work now; if you are having trouble recruiting volunteers, it’s overdue for you to take a hard, in-depth look at both how you recruit, what your in-take process is like, and the volunteer opportunities you have available.

Also see:

An incredible volunteer recruitment success story in Texas

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graphic by Jayne Cravens representing volunteersI have been training regarding volunteer management topics since the late 1990s. A frequently asked question I have gotten in my trainings is, “How do I get more black American men to sign up as volunteers with our program?” This question has come from a variety of nonprofits and schools. When I started training in the 1990s, I had zero ideas – I could not answer this question. I have had a lot of black American women in my audiences, but not men, especially when I was based in Texas, so I decided to ask some of them what their thoughts were in answer to the question. Two said the same thing to me on two different occasions: “I have no idea. When you find out, let me know.” I gathered ideas over the years, but never had the opportunity to put my own ideas into practice.

I did not, and I do not, for a second, believe any particular ethnic group is less inclined to volunteer. I do believe that different groups help their communities in different ways, and a lot of unpaid help to communities isn’t called volunteering – black men in the USA are giving back, but the ways they volunteer often go unrecognized. I also believe different groups face various obstacles to traditional, time-intensive volunteering: conflicting work schedules, family care needs, lack of transportation, lack of information about volunteering and language barriers. When I say lack of information, what I mean is that the volunteer recruitment message via one particular channel often does not reach everyone you want to reach. For instance, if I put volunteer recruitment messages only in the local newspaper, the majority of the community, which does NOT read the local paper, will never see it. If I put the messages only on Facebook, it’s unlikely teenagers will ever see it. When I say language barriers, I don’t always mean people for whom English is not their first language; I mean that certain words don’t mean the same to absolutely everyone. Volunteer doesn’t mean the same thing to everyone. Community service doesn’t mean the same to everyone. Mentor doesn’t always mean the same thing to everyone. So in constructing a message, you have to think about who you are talking to and what words might appeal to them.

With all of that in mind, the recent success of a middle school in Dallas, Texas in recruiting black American men to be mentors in their school has been inspiring and enlightening to me:

According to this web site, 68.4% of the student population at Billy Earl Dade Middle in Dallas identify as African-American – drastically different from that of a “typical: school in Texas which is made up of 12.6% African-American students on average. To qualify for free lunch, children’s family income must be under $15,171 in 2015 (below 130% of the poverty line), and 85.5% of students at Dade Middle School receive free lunch. To qualify for reduced lunch, children’s family income must be below $21,590 annual income in 2015 (185% of the poverty line). 3% of students at Billy Earl Dade Middle receive reduced lunch. As of 2016, the percent of students at this school who pass the State of Texas Assessments of Academic Readiness (STAAR) across all subjects was significantly lower than average for Texas. In short, the student body at Billy Earl Dade Middle School was largely “at risk.”

Parent involvement in a child’s early education is consistently found to be positively associated with a child’s academic performance (Hara & Burke, 1998; Hill & Craft, 2003; Marcon, 1999; Stevenson & Baker, 1987). A 2002 report from the Southwest Educational Development Laboratory, A New Wave of Evidence, found that students with parents involved in their schools and their school work, no matter their income or background, are more likely to:

  • Earn higher grades and test scores, and enroll in higher-level programs
  • Be promoted, pass their classes and earn credits
  • Attend school regularly
  • Have better social skills, show improved behavior and adapt well to school
  • Graduate and go on to post-secondary education

In December 2017, Billy Earl Dade Middle School ran into some difficulty when planning its annual “Breakfast with Dads” event. The school’s community liaison, Ellyn Favors, told the school’s Site Based Decision Making Team that student participation had been low in the past due to young men not having a father/father-figure available to attend the event. Kristina Dove, a community member on the team, decided to post a call for volunteers on Facebook in the hope of finding 50 male mentors to accompany the middle schoolers at the event:

This post was shared by several of her friends, including Stephanie Drenka, a popular blogger and photographer. The post was shared and reshared over and over, more than 125 times by the day of the event. They needed 150 men to sign up. More than 600 men showed up for the event. The event had to be moved from the cafeteria into the gymnasium because of the response. The event was so successful, so powerful, that it was covered by national media and online stories were shared over and over on social media. 

Why was this volunteer recruitment so successful? Based on all that I’ve read:

  • It was a simple way to get involved: just one hour of commitment at the school, with no requirement for anything else.
  • Why their attendance was so important was boiled down to simple, inspiring wording – easy to understand and oh-so-inviting to be a part of.
  • It was so simple to sign up.
  • It was oh-so-simple to share this message, and apparently, everyone on the team did so, to start.
  • The team had strong, trusting connections with key members of the community, so when they shared that message on social media, it reached those key members – who amplified it even more.

Had any one of those bullet points been missing from this equation, I’m not sure the recruitment would have been as successful.

What will happen now?

  • I hope the names and contact info of everyone who signed up is in an excel spreadsheet or database program, for easy reference.
  • I hope a variety of volunteering opportunities are created to entice these men to continue to be involved and accommodate their schedules, opportunities that range from more just-show-up episodic volunteering to more one-on-one, higher responsibility opportunities (and these will, of course, require more training and screening).
  • I hope the school is revisiting its safety policies and ensuring those are being followed.
  • I hope things are being put into place right now so that, in six months and a year from now, all of these activities can be evaluated, and successes can be bragged about and attract much-needed funding for the school so those successes can be amplified.

Congrats to Dade Middle School for getting it right. I’ll aspire to do the same.

Also see:

Have you enabled a Larry Nassar?

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Dr. Larry Nassar sexually molested more than 160 young girls. He didn’t drive around in a van and kidnap girls he didn’t know on their way to or from school. He didn’t jump out from behind a tree and grab a girl and run. He wasn’t a stranger to the girls he harmed, nor to their families. Coaches brought girls to Larry Nassar. Parents drove their girls to appointments with him. University officials and Olympic team officials created and supported the environment where Nassar was allowed to do this.

Does that scare you? Good. It should.

Rachael Denhollander, one of the first women to come forward with public accusations against Dr. Nassar, was the last to speak at his sentencing hearing. Her comments are worth noting: “Larry is the most dangerous type of abuser. One who is capable of manipulating his victims through coldly calculated grooming methodologies, presenting the most wholesome and caring external persona as a deliberate means to ensure a steady stream of young children to assault.”

Back in 2011, I wrote a blog called Why don’t they tell? Would they at your org?. It is about how, over the years, more than one person observed Jerry Sandusky, head of the nonprofit organization The Second Mile and former Penn State defensive coordinator, molesting boys, or heard someone say that they had witnessed such. Yet none of those people called the police and none of the people in authority that they told about what had been seen called police. The blog was about how we create environments where, not because of policies but because of culture, we discourage people from asking tough questions or reporting something that has the potential to be profoundly disruptive to everything an organization, a program, or a campaign is trying to do. It’s how, in so many cultures, we are discouraged from even asking questions. The #meetoo movement has confirmed so much of what I said in this blog back in 2011.

graphic by Jayne Cravens representing volunteersIn that blog, I challenged nonprofits, non-governmental agencies, universities, government departments and other mission-based programs – and particularly aid agencies with staff members in the field! – to take a hard look at not just their policies, but their culture. and I asked: Are you never hearing about inappropriate behavior by employees or volunteers at your organization not because nothing is happening, but because people don’t feel comfortable saying anything?

Per this latest case of harm to children, here’s some additional, more practical advice for parents and anyone working with kids in any capacity (coach, church group leader, etc.):

Any adult demanding or frequently asking for one-on-one, unsupervised time with a young person is something to look closely at and ask questions about, no matter that adult’s degree, job, religion or familial relationship. Whether it’s a doctor, a priest, a rabbi, an Iman, a teacher, a coach, a choir teacher, an uncle, an aunt, whatever: think about that one-on-one time, why it’s necessary, if it’s really necessary, if it’s appropriate, and how it makes you or your young person feel. Never let fears of how your questions might be perceived or that you might make someone uncomfortable keep you from asking questions. It’s perfectly reasonable and appropriate to say, before your kid goes on a school trip or sporting event, “Will any of these kids ever be alone, one-on-one, with an adult and, if so, what would the circumstances be?” As a parent, remember that you have EVERY right to say to any person in charge, to any adult in a program, even to a doctor, that you would prefer that one-on-one time not happen. This isn’t about parenting or managing from a place of fear and suspicion; it’s about parenting or managing from a place of “I’m watching and I care.”

One-on-one time between an adult and a child or teen is usually a wonderful, positive thing, something to be encouraged and cultivated in many circumstances. It would be a sadder world without one-on-one time between adults and children. But one-on-one time between an adult and a teen or child shouldn’t happen just because of someone’s title, and shouldn’t happen without questions. Ask questions. Decide your comfort level. Listen to kids – and watch them, because often, their behavior will tell you very quickly that there is a problem.

Also see:

Voluntourism is fighting back

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I have voluntourism in my Google Alerts, so that I can get links to press releases, news articles that mention the term. I’m not fond of voluntourism, where volunteers pay large amounts of money to go abroad for a few weeks, or even several weeks, to engage in a short-term activity that will give them a sense of helping people, animals or the environment. I look at this growing industry with great skepticism in terms of actually helping anyone, because it’s focused on the wants of the volunteer – that feel-good, often highly photogenic experience – not the critical local needs of local people or the environment, and there’s little screening of volunteers – most everyone is taken, so long as they can pay. What these foreigners bring through these voluntourism programs is often not skills, experience or capabilities that cannot be found locally – it’s money, and I see no evidence that this money benefits local people – maybe the people that run the program are “helped”, but not those meant to be helped by the volunteers. I don’t think all pay-to-volunteer schemes are horrid, and I don’t think creating a vacation that has a social or environmental “good” goal (transire benefaciendo) is a bad thing, but I think there are a tremendous number of voluntourism programs out there that aren’t really benefitting communities in the developing world – and some are actually causing harm. I push back to questions about and posts prompting voluntourism on Quora and Reddit, and I’ve been pleased to see more and more people doing the same. That push-back must be working, because now I’m also seeing a lot of voluntourism companies aggressively fighting back on the blogosphere, asserting that their programs are worthwhile (but never offering hard data to prove it).

I’ve been happy to see the tide turning against many forms of voluntourism as people realize that work abroad should make local people the number one priority, not the feel-good experience for a foreign volunteer. For instance, Australian NGOs are refusing to place volunteers in orphanages abroad, because of the exploitation of children, potential harm to children, and lack of any data showing such voluntourism helps children at all.

The UK’s International Citizen Service (ICS), which has placed thousands of young people in volunteer roles around the world, is now under scrutiny: Voluntary Service Overseas (VSO) has taken action against ICS and other members of the UK consortium of organizations providing volunteering opportunities over safety concerns. The UK’s Department for International Development (DFID), according to a report by VSO, regarded ICS as a “high-risk programme due to the security and safety issues” involved.  “ICS safeguarding incidents have included death by drowning of two volunteers, sexual assaults, and the detention of volunteers by local police.” Volunteers live and work in countries where they may be exposed to petty and violent crime, political instability, endemic diseases and natural disasters.

There’s even a growing backlash against medical voluntourism, per reporting by Noelle Sullivan, a member of the faculty in global health studies at Northwestern University, who says her research shows that some people volunteering abroad for a few weeks, or several weeks, to engage in medical “help” for people in developing countries “does indeed cause harm.

It must be taking its toll, because I got a link to a press release about how a certain African “foundation” has hired a PR agency “to change the public perception of medical volunteering or voluntourism.” I’m not going to link to the press release – no free publicity here for a for-profit marketing company. But I had a look at the “foundation”‘s web site. The site is mostly about the gorgeous “luxury” accommodations for volunteers on a game reserve, whcih has an onsite gym, an infinity pool, a private patio “for stargazing,” and nearby opportunities for hiking, mountain biking, golfing, weight training, yoga, abseiling, white river rafting, tubing, kloofing, microlighting, helicopter rides, “and hot air ballooning!” The company can hook volunteers up with wildlife photography tours and photography courses, half day trips to an animal rehabilitation center “featured on National Geographic,” and visits for “pampering yourself at the local spas.” I’m surprised there aren’t workshops provided on how to take the perfect “Look how I’m helping these poor people” selfies… Oh, there is a page or two about the medical services volunteers will squeeze into their busy schedule enjoying all that hiking and hot air ballooning.

Update: a blog from 2015, where animal “help” becomes animal “torture”

“The ‘turtle conservation program’ was shut down after the police came (there is a law in Fiji to protect turtles as they are threatened by extinction). A girl made a… ehh… Let’s say critical Facebook post. I think ‘inhuman’ and ‘animal torture’ were some of the words she used… I’m just glad that I got my money back without any problem because I know about 7 people who had to go to court to get some of their money back because the agencies made a lot of great promises without keeping them. What they offer is not really volunteer work, here they call it voluntourism. A lot of money which doesn’t actually help anybody but just finances the international agencies. I got quite disillusioned about volunteering here. I left the volunteer house as soon as possible and went to a resort. The turtles were set free, but they are probably dead because they have been in the tank for too long and weren’t able to survive anymore. I’m so sorry for them.”

Also see:

Governor Bevin & Donald Trump Are Wrong on Community Service Requirements

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logoRemember at the start of the year when I warned that 2018 is the time for USA nonprofits to be demanding?

Well, here we go.

Kentucky Governor Matt Bevin and Donald Trump, as well as governors all over the USA, want to require unemployed Medicaid members to volunteer with nonprofit organizations – or, probably, Christian churches – in order to receive those benefits.

This idea was first floated back in Spring 2017. At that time, Danielle Clore, executive director of the Kentucky Nonprofit Network, had a lot to say to Bevin’s office when it asked the group to support his proposal:

The bottom line is this will cost nonprofits money – money and resources we don’t have to spare. It takes professionals to effectively manage volunteers. For the experience to be valuable for both the agency and the individual, volunteer efforts have to be managed. Is it worth the limited and precious resources of a nonprofit to manage a volunteer that is there because ‘they have to be,’ not because they want to be? Nonprofit employees are spread so thin as it is and I feel like a volunteer requirement for anyone not truly committed to the mission of the agency isn’t an effective use of anyone’s time.

I do not typically take people who are ‘required’ to volunteer, because they don’t make good volunteers. Also, 20 hours is A LOT OF TIME. We don’t allow people to volunteer that many hours because at that point they could be considered a part time employee employee, and you have potential legal issues to consider.

Emily Beauregard, executive director of Kentucky Voices for Health, told Kentucky Health News in an interview at that time, “We need to provide them with the support services that they need, but forcing people to volunteer in order to get health care doesn’t make anybody healthier. We know this. There are data to suggest that. In fact, sometimes these stringent requirements put people in a position where they are unable to get care and then they get sick, and they are unable to work.”

I’ve blogged about all this before, in April 2017, when I said that requirements to volunteer are getting out of hand. And I’m calling on all nonprofit centers, all consultants regarding nonprofit management, including volunteer management, and everyone claiming to be advocates for volunteerism to speak out about this.

Here here’s my Facebook post about how I feel:

Nonprofits are not sitting around saying, “I wish several thousand people were forced to volunteer and they would then show up at our offices to do all this work we have just laying around waiting to be done by just any ole’ person that comes through the door.” Bevin and Trump are expecting nonprofits to involve several thousand more people as volunteers – people who are being forced into the act – but without funding all of the increased costs nonprofits are going to have to create more assignments and supervise these people. Nonprofits, don’t do it. Just DON’T. Not without a great deal more money.

Let’s see your statement.

Also see:

Learning From The ‘Not-So-Nice’ Volunteers

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graphic by Jayne Cravens representing volunteersI am trying to find and revive some of the most popular articles and commentaries I’ve written over the years that were hosted on other people’s web sites, many of which are now only available on archive.org, and then only if you can remember the URL of the defunct site.

In 2004, I was invited by Mary Merrill to write a column for her December Topic of the Month. My topic was:

Learning From The ‘Not-So-Nice’ Volunteers

The premise: we have a lot to learn from the “not-so-nice volunteers”, the people who are putting their time and energy into defending human rights, addressing social ills, and battling institutions who they feel are attacking their quality of life or an element of their community that they treasure. And we have a lot to learn from the people who manage such volunteers.

I’ve reposted that article on my own site.