Category Archives: Community / Volunteer Engagement

Infuriating statements about volunteering

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graphic by Jayne Cravens representing volunteers

When it comes to talking about volunteer engagement, I am just not at all about bunnies and fluff and warm fuzzies and hugs. I don’t like talking about volunteers as nice but, rather, as necessary, for a whole range of reasons that have nothing to do with money. I think talking about volunteers in terms of warm fuzzies devalues both what volunteers do and what the nonprofits and other programs they support do.

I also cringe over the idea of entitlement regarding volunteers: those people who believe that their desire to do a certain kind of volunteering should be all they need to get to do that volunteering, regardless of what people actually need.

I admit it: I’m not very kind in response to such people. Especially lately.

There are statements and attitudes about volunteering that make my blood boil. They contribute to volunteer engagement not being taken seriously and not being financially supported, and in some cases, to a patriarchal, colonialist view of volunteering, and excuse for volunteers for having that view.

Here are some of those statements that send me over the edge:

  • Volunteering is great, but it’s not serious, like a job. Volunteers can never do something as well as someone that’s paid to do that thing. they can never be experts.
  • People can volunteer whenever they might have some time and solve homelessness, create economic opportunities leading to equity, stop climate change, and solve other serious social and environmental issues. Volunteering is something you do when you don’t really have anything else to do or when you feel like doing it.
  • I feel like I would be good at counseling people, because I do it with friends / at my bartending job, so I should get to counsel people as a volunteer, but I don’t want to have to go through a bunch of training.
  • I like animals, so I should get to volunteer with wildlife, like elephants and baby orphaned tigers.
  • My company’s employees want to work with kids, so the local school should let us host a pizza party for the sixth graders this Friday, from noon to 1.
  • People in poor communities wish people with really “good hearts” from other places will come to their communities and do things local people would like to do themselves: build schools, care for orphaned children, build wells, care for wildlife, etc. And those people in those poor communities want to give these foreign volunteers free housing and these people are so grateful that these volunteers come there, even for just a week or two.
  • Volunteers are cost-free.

I read comments like these all the time on Quora and Reddit. Here’s a perfect example of such. I’ve edited for brevity (the original post is much longer):

I am curious if working for nonprofits or volunteering can become be lucrative at all. I wish I could just live off tips or donations from people that I’ve made their lives better.

I spend a lot of time just talking to people about their problems. Genuinely listening and focusing on them, trying to guide or nurture towards where they are looking to grow, or nudge them towards solutions that are just out of reach. I spend a few minutes a day just answering posts in FB vent groups or lonely people. Just generally check in with people and see how I can make their day better.

I always liked the sense of freedom from volunteering. Especially in a situation where you can work as much or as little as you want. Come in whenever, or on a loose schedule, etc.

Is there low pressure, humanistic jobs, volunteer work, or non profit work that would support a minimalist lifestyle but provide enough to not stagnate? I’m not afraid of labor, but would want to do it on my own terms.

The privilege in this post… the vanity… the stereotypes about not just volunteering but about the help people in crisis need, that it’s all something you can do whenever you might feel like it, and just do it, ’cause, you know, you have a good heart and you really “get” people… yes, my blood is boiling.

While I absolutely believe volunteering can be fun, that it can be informal, and that it can be episodic (one-time event, no further obligation), I also believe volunteering should be something that has some sort of actual impact for the organization, that it should serve the organization and its mission primirarily, and that it shouldn’t be mainly about giving a volunteer a feel-good “look, I helped!” experience. While I believe volunteers can have great ideas about what volunteers should do – virtual volunteering has been driven mostly by volunteers, in fact – I also believe that the final say regarding volunteer engagement is always what the organization and its clients need.

I also believe volunteering, even for just a few hours, is a real commitment, because the issues addressed by volunteer are real, sometimes even urgent, issues. Come in whenever you might feel like it? I would fire volunteers for that. It’s profoundly disrespectful to the causes nonprofits attempt to address.

The work of nonprofits is serious. That work addresses homelessness, it helps the environment, it helps people experiencing domestic violence, it helps communities with a range of quality of life issues, it helps people recover from disasters and on and on. It is not for “whenever I might feel like it because, you know, freedom!” Volunteering is not for the cavalier. It’s not for photos for your Instagram page.

My advice to the person I quoted above? Maybe doing some episodic volunteering, like cleaning up a beach – but, you know, only if you might maybe feel like it.

I’m tired.

Also see:

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FREE books on management of volunteers

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Wow. The Ellis Archive has released a bunch of volunteer management books for FREE. These are books that Susan Ellis sold for years through her company, Energize, Inc.

If you don’t know: Susan was the world’s expert on the effective management of volunteers, and her company, Energize, was the world’s largest publisher of books on volunteer management. I was her disciple when it came to volunteer management, one of many. And she was the first promoters of virtual volunteering. We wrote The Last Virtual Volunteering Guidebook together (it’s not free, however).  

If you are a person that works with volunteers, or wants to, all of these books are worth your time to read (don’t just download them!)

Funded by the Susan J. Ellis Foundation, the Ellis Archive primarily consists of digitized documents from Susan J. Ellis‘ personal resource library. The Ellis Archive is searchable by title, source, year, author, and keyword topic. Special tags also exist for Research, Non-US/International, and AVA history items.Items in the archive are organized into 32 keyword topics, with some cross-referencing. These topics also represent a broad range of mission-focused areas, such as the arts, criminal justice, social services, the environment, healthcare, government, education, etc. Most content originates from 1970 through 2004. However, there are seminal works dated as early as 1947, and a few documents as recent as 2010. Also included are numerous items from the private libraries of two pioneer volunteer leaders – Harriet Naylor and Ivan Scheier, prodigious writers and highly respected mentors to Susan. Much of Scheier’s work was originally digitized by Regis University and now continues to be accessible as part of this Archive. In addition, the Minnesota Office of Volunteer Services Resource Library gave a few of its publications to Susan when that office closed in 2002; these publications are now a part of this Archive. The Archive also includes historical items documenting some of the history of the Association for Volunteer Administration (AVA).

National Service Has Presidential Support Again!

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The previous presidential administration tried repeatedly to eliminate national service.

By contrast, the current administration, headed by President Joe Biden, has designated $1 billion in the Fiscal Year 2021 Reconciliation Bill, known as the American Rescue Plan, for the Corporation for National and Community Service (CNCS). The investment will help to stabilize existing national service programs, increase the benefits for those who serve, and deploy additional full and part-time members to support their communities’ response to COVID-19.

In a statement, AnnMaura Connolly, President of Voices for National Service, said:

Since the coronavirus outbreak, members of AmeriCorps and AmeriCorps Seniors have acted quickly and creatively to address gaps in services and persistent inequities that have only been worsened by the pandemic… The additional funding provides a triple bottom line: the opportunity to engage more Americans in pandemic relief efforts, such as helping schools safely reopen and tackling the growing hunger crisis; an important accelerator for increasing equity in national service; and a proven pathway help prepare young people prepare for future jobs, particularly for populations hardest hit by the pandemic.

And I am being contacted by state AmeriCorps programs again, at long last, regarding training in volunteer support and management. In fact, one program bought 26 copies from me of the Last Virtual Volunteering Guidebook: Fully Integrating Online Service Into Volunteer Involvement for each AmeriCorps member of various public health initiatives.

Make no mistake: this funding from Congress, lead by the President is, in part, because of vocal activism by nonprofits and others to their US Representatives and Senators. It’s long overdue for nonprofits to speak out on these and so many other issues. You ARE allowed to do this if you have nonprofit status!

I am a huge fan of AmeriCorps, particularly VISTA and NCCC. I wish more young people knew about these opportunities. I wish these had been options for me when I was in my 20s. And the help from AmeriCorps isn’t just within the bounds of a service site: there are so many fantastic resources out there because of these national service programs, like this Toolkit for Working with Rural Volunteers. I have the honor to work with AmeriCorps members many times, first back in the 1990s, when I helped put together a handbook for AmeriCorpsVISTAs in charge of managing school-based volunteers for Sanchez Elementary School in Austin, Texas, written by various AmeriCorps members over the years in the program. I also have frequently trained AmeriCorps members on volunteer management 101, and I have a page especially for AmeriCorps members that curates the volunteer management resources I reference in my workshops.

FYI, Voices for National Service was founded in 2003 and is a coalition of national service programs, state service commissions and individual champions, who work to ensure Americans of all ages and backgrounds have the opportunity to serve and volunteer in their community.

Also see:

If you have benefited from this blog 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. 

Virtual Volunteering & Employability

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Back in 2012 and 2013, I was part of the ICT4EMPL Future Work project, focused on the countries of the European Union and funded by the European Commission. The overall project aimed to inform policy regarding “new forms of work” and pathways to employability that involved online technologies. The overall ICT4EMPL project produced a series of reports on the state of play of novel forms of internet-mediated work activity: crowd-sourced labour, crowdfunding, and internet-mediated work exchange (timebanks and complementary currency) and, of course, internet-mediated volunteering (virtual volunteering).

For this project, I got to research and map the prevalence of virtual volunteering in Europe and explore how virtual volunteering could support people’s employability: Here my complete final paper. And here is the Wiki I created for the project.

Included in this paper was Chapter 4, Internet-mediated volunteering and employability. I’ve reproduced the text from Chapter 4 on the web so that it’s more findable.

Traditional volunteering – onsite, face-to-face – has been a good source for people to acquire or enhance new skills, explore careers and network with others all towards improving their employability. As the paper notes, along with enhancing technical skills and subject knowledge, employers also want other skills, many of which can be acquired through virtual volunteering:

  • Communication and interpersonal skills,
  • Problem-solving skills,
  • Using your initiative and being self-motivated,
  • Working under pressure and to deadlines,
  • Organizational skills,
  • Team working,
  • Ability to learn and adapt,
  • Numeracy,
  • Valuing diversity and difference

This chapter of my paper looks at how virtual volunteering can help to enhance those skills, as well as challenges and risk in promoting online volunteering as a route to employability.

If your agency or organization is considering virtual volunteering as a path to helping people become more employable, check out the Last Virtual Volunteering Guidebook: Fully Integrating Online Service Into Volunteer Involvement. The book can help you fully explore the reality of remote volunteer engagement and what you and partner organizations will need to put in place, in terms of policy and procedures, to ensure success. This book was helpful long before the global pandemic spurred so many organizations to, at last, embrace virtual volunteering. This is the most comprehensive resource anywhere on working with online volunteers, and on using the Internet to support ALL volunteers, including those you might not think of as “online” volunteers.

If you have benefited from this blog or other parts of my web site or my YouTube videos 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. 

I hope we stop talking about virtual volunteering

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I really do mean that headline: I hope we will stop talking about virtual volunteering.

What I mean is: I hope we will stop talking about online volunteers versus onsite volunteers. I would be so happy to never hear the phrase “virtual” volunteers, distinguishing them from “real” volunteers, ever again. I hope that, at last, all managers of volunteers realize they need to be using the Internet to engage and support ALL volunteers.

Co-author Susan Ellis and I wanted The Last Virtual Volunteering Guidebook to be a turning point, to be the last time anyone talked about using the Internet to engage and support volunteers as something separate and completely different than engaging and supporting traditional onsite volunteers. We hoped the book would be the moment that virtual volunteering stopped being segregated to separate books or a separate chapter at the end of a volunteer management book or a separate workshop on volunteer recruitment, volunteer support, etc.

Sadly, the publication of the book was not the turning point we were hoping for.

So… could the pandemic and the massive rise in popularity of virtual volunteering be that turning point? Could this be the moment that we stop thinking of volunteer engagement this way, with groups completely segregated from each other:

And, instead, we think of volunteer engagement this way, with everyone in the yellow oval being volunteers and intersecting together, and being in more than one grouping?

They are all volunteers. And unless the volunteers don’t have Internet access, you should be using the Internet to engage and support all of your volunteers – to refuse to do so creates so much more work for you, the manager, and leaves out so, so many people as volunteers – it undermines any goals you might have regarding diversity and inclusion.

(Yes, there are volunteers without Internet access – just as there are volunteers who don’t like your traditional thank-you banquet and choose not to attend, or volunteers who don’t like working with the public or in groups and prefer to work behind-the-scenes, alone. No one thing you do onsite, face-to-face is appropriate for all volunteers.)

If you are writing a book or teaching a class about the basics of volunteer management, it should talk about using the Internet to support and engage volunteers – not at the end, but throughout the book or workshop. If you are going to focus on how to

  • identify tasks for volunteers
  • recruit volunteers
  • keep volunteers engaged/volunteer retainment
  • recognize/honor volunteers.

Then you should be talking about:

  • identifying tasks people can do online, not just onsite
  • using the Internet to recruit volunteers for both onsite and online roles and tasks.
  • using Internet tools to keep volunteers engaged/volunteer retainment
  • using your web site, YouTube, social media and other Internet tools to recognize and honor volunteers.

You don’t even have to say the phrase virtual volunteering in your workshop or article. People don’t think of themselves as online volunteers – just as volunteers, so why are you talking about them as this completely separate group?!

Also see:

cover of Virtual Volunteering book with hands raising up various Internet connected devices

The Last Virtual Volunteering Guidebook is a volunteer management book for anyone that supports or engages volunteers, or who cares about the overall volunteer engagement at their agency. The book has never been just for people that want to involve online volunteers. In fact, the book emphasizes support for ALL VOLUNTEERS more than any other topic. When Susan Ellis and I wrote The Last Virtual Volunteering Guidebook, we never envisioned a global pandemic creating this massive, sudden shift to virtual volunteering for so many agencies, and I’m glad the book has been helpful to so many in these trying, fatiguing times, but I worry that people are thinking of virtual volunteering as something that will go away when the pandemic eases. Just as virtual volunteering is a practice that’s more than 35 years old and undertaken by thousands of organizations long before 2020, it will continue to be not only a reality, and an expectation.

Also see:

Request to all those training re: volunteer management (blog).

My own training videos (all free!).

If you have benefited from this blog or other parts of my web site or my YouTube videos 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. 

Helping online volunteers stay engaged & energized

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In pre-pandemic times, an online meeting felt like a luxury, a welcomed relief from driving to a site or taking mass transit. Now, because of COVID-19. when the only way to safely work together is online or via the phone, we’re all burned out by online meetings, and there’s nothing virtual about our fatigue.

In addition, volunteering onsite is a way to be a different person than we are at our paid work or in a classroom or even with our families. It’s a way to feel like we’re making a difference in the world. It can be a refreshing change from other parts of our life. For people that live alone, volunteering onsite can provide a much needed social life. While I think online volunteering can be wonderfully personal, I also know that virtual meetings, virtually all the time, is not the world most of us want to live in.

Volunteers are exhausted. Many that still have jobs and struggling to do those and assume new family care obligations – children are in virtual school and some older relatives have moved back in with younger family members. Many are having to look over their finances every day. Most everyone is scared of for their own health as well as everyone else in their household. And many people, especially living alone, are oh-so-lonely. Volunteering these days doesn’t offer the time out it did in pre-pandemic times – it can just feel like another online meeting.

But nonprofits still need volunteers, and volunteers still need volunteering. I know so many nonprofits, NGOs, charities and other groups have a huge amount on their plate these days and far more stresses than usual, but we all need to take a deep breath and spare some thoughts for both our current volunteers and those we want to recruit.

How to Recruit & Engage Volunteers in a Time of Virtual Fatigue, an article is by WBT Systems, which produces TopClass LMS, a learning management system for membership-based associations, has great advice for any program involving volunteers. It starts with some basics from quality volunteer engagement we should all know and apply even in non-pandemic times, like creating realistic roles for volunteers and emphasizing why the task matters to the program and the difference it will make. But then it gets into more specific advice that relates to current remote working challenges, which I’ve reframed and expanded below.

For instance, we all need to better commit to SHORT meetings that have a definite purpose and a definite start and end time. Don’t have a general, open group volunteer meeting; have a here’s-what-everyone’s-doing meeting, devoted exclusively to elevator speeches from each volunteer. Or have a celebrate-one-accomplishment meeting, devoted solely to quick updates. Whatever the meeting, be able to answer these questions: what do I want to happen as a result of this meeting? Why does this meeting matter? Why can’t you ask for this info via email?

I like to prepare my meetings as though it’s a stage performance: I like start and end on time and know exactly what I want to say, but also be ready for a spontaneous improv moment! I also am ready to facilitate: to frankly, politely tell a person who is going too long that we are going to have to table that discussion until later, for instance, because we need to hear from everyone.

Also regarding meetings, the article suggests telling volunteers you will open up an online meeting 15 minutes before the start and leave it open 15 minutes after so they have a chance for chatting, if they wish. I have REALLY enjoyed this in meetings and webinars.

I sometimes encourage people I’m meeting with to have the meeting in a different room than they are in usually – and I do the same. The same rules apply: you should be in a well-lit room that does not have lots of distractions, if at all possible (people walking through the space, intrusive sound, etc.). Otherwise, you might be surprised at how refreshing it feels to have a meeting in a different room, or even just in a different place in the usual room.

In addition, I like when I don’t have to have a full meeting to get a question resolved or check-in with everyone – I like having a Slack channel just for volunteers I’m working with, so they can check-in or ask a question of me, any time. It’s a virtual way of dropping by my office. And it keeps messages out of my email in-box.

The WBT Systems article suggests that you “Invite someone to Zoombomb the end of the meeting, perhaps the CEO, board chair or another leader who thanks the volunteers for giving their time and talent.” I LOVE this idea.

I’m somewhat tepid on the idea of things like encouraging everyone to wear a hat, or having everyone bring a toy to a meeting, etc. – the article doesn’t suggest this, but I’ve seen it elsewhere. I’m not big on ice breakers before every onsite meeting – I do not like having my time wasted, especially when I’ve schlepped across town or had to juggle to carve out time for a meeting, and everyone going around the room talking about who their favorite superhero is (Wonder Woman in the DC universe, Jane as Thor in Marvel). Online, I can find meeting games even more annoying. I want to feel like my time is valued and what’s most needed is getting done. In the end, you have to know your audience, you have to experiment and be observant, you have to be open to what is NOT working, and you have to work towards balance.

cover of Virtual Volunteering book with hands raising up various Internet connected devices

Don’t assume staff working with volunteers, or even volunteers themselves, understand how to lead and manage virtually. Yes, I’m going to yet again recommend The Last Virtual Volunteering Guidebook, which emphasizes support for volunteers more than any other topic. Also, if you have time, look for videos and articles that could help others, and if you don’t have time, recruit a volunteer to curate such for you to review and share.

When Susan Ellis and I wrote The Last Virtual Volunteering Guidebook, we never envisioned a global pandemic creating this massive, sudden shift to virtual volunteering for so many agencies. I’m glad to be able to recommend this detailed resource for ensuring success in virtual volunteering, with far more information than a blog or webinar ever could.

Also see:

If you have benefited from this blog or other parts of my web site or my YouTube videos 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. 

Online Community Management as Volunteer Management

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I’m preparing to teach a class on online community management for nonprofits, through a college back East in the USA (details in the coming weeks), and I realized recently I had done a presentation that I can use in class. The presentation is from 2014 for a group called OCTribe, a monthly in-person meeting in San Francisco. It was a meetup for online community managers, enthusiasts and innovators interested in social networking applications, social media and online group collaboration. “We discuss tools and strategies to enhance participation in the various online communities we support.” The event was hosted at the TechSoup offices.

My presentation, which was also live-streamed on YouTube, is exactly as it is titled: online community management as volunteer management. I look at participants in an online community, especially when I’m the moderator or facilitator of that community, as volunteers – they aren’t paid to participate, they aren’t paid to contribute, and yet, they do. I think cultivating new community members is a lot like cultivating new volunteers, I think supporting and keeping community members is a lot like supporting and keeping new volunteers, and on and on.

I have the presentation available both as a podcast (about 40 minutes) that you can live stream from my web site or download, however you like, and in a video that I have edited. The video isn’t very good, but don’t worry about seeing the slides – I say out loud during the presentation most everything that is on them. I also repeat the questions and comments people ask.

The video is now a part of my playlist of trainings – I have more than two hours of free training by video on my own YouTube channel, plus links to trainings I’ve provided on other YouTube channels. I would so appreciate it if you could “like” my latest video on YouTube, as well as to subscribe to my channel.

There’s no question that contributing to online communities can help you professionally – I know because it’s how I’ve landed full-time jobs and consultancies for more than 25 years.

cover of Virtual Volunteering book with hands raising up various Internet connected devices

Also, the Last Virtual Volunteering Guidebook: Fully Integrating Online Service Into Volunteer Involvement can help you better work with people online – specifically volunteers, and including participants in an online community that relates to the work of a nonprofit, NGO, library, environmental issue, humanitarian concern, and on and on. This book was helpful long before the global pandemic spurred so many organizations to, at last, embrace virtual volunteering. This is the most comprehensive resource anywhere on working with online volunteers, and on using the Internet to support ALL volunteers, including those you might not think of as online volunteers. It’s available both as a traditional paperback book and in electronic format.

If you have benefited from this blog or other parts of my web site or my YouTube videos 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. 

High Impact Virtual Volunteering

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The world will get safer as more people get vaccinated against SARS-CoV-2, the infectious disease which causes Coronavirus disease 2019 (COVID-19), but health officials are saying over and over that our world is going to stay the way it is for most of 2021, and probably well into 2022: face masks will continue to be needed in order not to spread this or other viruses, even if you aren’t sick from such. We will need to continue to avoid groups of people, including large crowds. We will need to socially distance. People vulnerable to the illness will need to continue to be protected.

And while lots of precautions will, I hope, continue to be taken to ensure onsite volunteering can be done safely amid the ongoing threat from COVID-19, it also means that virtual volunteering – using the Internet to support and engage volunteers – is going to still be necessary, even for organizations that avoided the practice for decades. And the reality is that virtual volunteering – a practice that’s more than 35 years old and that thousands of organizations were leveraging long before the global pandemic – is a tool that creates an avenue to involve volunteers that could not be involved otherwise and is an avenue of volunteering that many people actively seek out even when there isn’t a dangerous virus lurking about.

High Impact virtual volunteering has always been something many volunteers have sought. While many consultants, especially from the private sector, say the trend for volunteers is towards micro-tasks, I disagree: I hear people saying they want to make a real impact in volunteering, an investment of time that makes a real difference, that isn’t just about minutes or hours done, and isn’t about a check box of tasks completed. I’ve been talking about the desire of volunteers for this kind of deeper-investment virtual volunteering since 2015, including in this blog, the future of virtual volunteering? Deeper relationships, higher impact. In that blog, I said:

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.

I always have to remind people at this point that 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. If you want to give lots of people a taste of your program, with an eye to cultivating those people into longer-term volunteers, and/or donors, and you have the time to create and support microvolunteering assignments, great, go for it!

But I continue to hear and see a growing number of comments, especially young people, saying they want more than just a “quickie” volunteering experience. They want more than number-of-hours volunteering and 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. And not just for virtual volunteering! They also want it for onsite volunteering.

I’ve talked about the factors for success in what I’ve called direct-contact or direct-support online volunteers since the 1990s, first via the Virtual Volunteering Project. I have continued to try to highlight those kinds of virtual volunteering roles and tasks specifically via the news section of the Virtual Volunteering Wiki and this list of online mentoring programs (all of which I maintain with no support and no funding to do so). And it was very satisfying to hear directly from programs involving online volunteers recently and to hear them confirm the best practices I’ve promoted for years.

When a university contacted me this year about what their student volunteering abroad program could look like online instead, a program where students provided medical help with medical and public health professionals in other countries, I put together a quick list of what this could look like, based on these resources I’d continued to maintain, and I’ve been adding to it ever since. This list of what high-impact virtual volunteering looks like, with links to examples, is for people seeking ideas for an online project that will mobilize online volunteers in activities that lead to a sustainable, lasting benefit to a community or cause, particularly for a community or audience that is at-risk or under-served. It was created especially for programs looking for ways to engage online volunteers in high-responsibility, high-impact tasks focused on communities in the developing world. Note that these ideas absolutely can be adapted for remote volunteering within the same country where the online volunteers live as well – “remote” could mean across town rather than around the world.

Also see:

Hearing Directly from Programs Involving Online Volunteers

How will SARS-CoV-2 & COVID-19 affect volunteering abroad?

Safety in Virtual Volunteering

Also see:

Also, the Last Virtual Volunteering Guidebook: Fully Integrating Online Service Into Volunteer Involvement can help you better work with people online – specifically volunteers. These can be volunteers in short-term, “microvolunteering” tasks or longer-term, more high-responsibility roles, like what is highlighted here in the blog you are reading now. These can be volunteers who do some or most of their service onsite, at your organization, or volunteers who do most or all of their service remotely, rarely or ever onsite and in-person with you. This book was helpful long before the global pandemic spurred so many organizations to, at last, embrace virtual volunteering. This is the most comprehensive resource anywhere on working with online volunteers, and on using the Internet to support ALL volunteers, including those you might not think of as “online” volunteers.

If you have benefited from this blog or other parts of my web site or my YouTube videos 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. 

Can volunteerism repair a nation?

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Can volunteering repair a nation? I don’t mean dealing with infrastructure after a war or natural disaster – we know that volunteers are terrific at repairing homes, clearing roads, helping at shelters, rowing boats, etc. I mean can volunteerism be an effective tool when a nation’s people are so divided that they don’t even see reality the same way?

Maybe.

I confess that I am not one for talking about volunteering as a way to access “warm fuzzies” – for optimistic, hopeful moments of restoration of faith in all humanity. Personally, I’m a skeptic at best and a cynic at worst. But I do believe in volunteer engagement as an amazing tool: to build awareness about an issue among a group or population, to give the community a hands-on experience regarding a cause, to educate a group about the realities of a topic, to build understanding among people who may not know much about each other, or might even be hostile, and maybe, just maybe, to restore faith in institutions and other people.

A lot of politicians are talking about coming together and unity among people in the USA, but, as we all are fully aware, that’s going to take more than just talking about it. It’s also only a matter of time before some of those same people start suggesting volunteerism as a salve to heal the nation’s wounds and “unify” the people. They are picturing people of different political parties working side-by-side to clean up trash or paint over graffiti or build something.

But here is what’s going to be missing from that call-to-volunteer-and-let’s-come-together rhetoric, and what it’s going to take for volunteer engagement to lead to bridge-building among people who are oh-so-polarized:

  • Nonprofits expected to involve volunteers, especially MORE volunteers, need MONEY. Why? Because volunteers are never free. Want nonprofits to create more roles and tasks for more volunteers? Give those nonprofits cash: for staff to supervise and support volunteers, for staff training in effective volunteer engagement, and for all of the snazzy tech tools you want nonprofits to use to engage with volunteers. And that’s just to start: these nonprofits will also need training in recruiting for diversity, in conflict management, regarding effective facilitation, in inclusive volunteer engagement and communication, and more if you want them to fulfill your dreams of unity – and that requires skills they may not have, and to get those skills requires classes and consultants and that costs money.
  • Ready to fund childcare? Because if you want more people to volunteer, and you want a greater diversity of people to volunteer, someone is going to have to pay for childcare for volunteers with children.
  • Government has to bring nonprofits to the table for discussions about how to bring disparate groups of people together. If the mayor is having a council on ways to create reconciliation among a diverse city, local nonprofits need to be in the discussions. If a regional or state government body is exploring methods, nonprofits have to be there – not just the big, major nonprofits but the small grassroots groups too. And a key segment that has to be there in discussions: ARTS GROUPS: theater, dance, music, literature and fine arts.
  • We all have to stop talking about volunteering only as a way to get tasks done. We have to talk about volunteering as a way for all participants – volunteers, employees and clients – to have a transformational experience. And that means that, often, involving volunteers means tasks will not be done as efficiently and economically as possible: it’s much easier to hire one person or involve one highly-skilled volunteer to do a task than to create a way for a group of dissimilar people with a range of skills and experiences to do it at a time when everyone in that group might be available. It also means making volunteering about learning about an issue related to the mission of the organization – climate change, the reasons people are homeless, the challenges faced by under-employed people, etc. – again, not just getting work done, and not all people charged with creating volunteering tasks and roles and managing volunteers have the skillset to do that.
  • Accept that some people aren’t going to be engaged as volunteers because of a requirement at many nonprofits and community groups regarding respect and conduct of employees, consultants and volunteers, because of requirements regarding safety, and because of the potential of volunteers to spread misinformation about the focus of the nonprofit or the cause it addresses. For instance, someone who believes and promotes misinformation about child trafficking on their social media is going to be inappropriate to help at organizations related to children. Someone who does not believe in the safety of vaccines or believes the Earth is flat or refutes other science, and let’s that be known, is going to probably be inappropriate in a range of volunteering roles related to human health, marine health, outdoor geological sites, etc., especially if they will interact with other volunteers or the public. Many nonprofits have a stated commitment to creating a work culture that promotes respect and prohibits words or actions that create a hostile work environment for others. Many nonprofits have a stated commitment to equality and inclusion, and a stated refutation of racism, sexism or hate speech, and a volunteer or employee engaging in actions or language outside of their work that is in contrast to that culture could, as a result upon discovery, be dismissed. Nonprofits should not be pressured to involve volunteers who engage in misinformation that would harm the clients a nonprofit works with or that runs counter to the mission of the organization. Nonprofits should not be pressured to engage volunteers who carry weapons if that nonprofit has a policy that prevents weapons from their workspaces. And all of that means some people are going to be excluded from volunteer engagement at some organizations. Before you decide that’s somehow wrong, that everyone should have a right to volunteer anywhere they want to, note that I myself am excluded from volunteering at some organizations because I cannot adhere to their religious belief requirements, and I accept that.
  • It’s a tall order to ask organizations focused on some aspect of the environment and outdoor spaces – wildlife habitat preservation, restoring wetlands, cleaning up trash at the beach, rescue groups, etc. – to engage in additional activities to counter misinformation among volunteers regarding climate change, but that’s exactly what nonprofits need to be funded and empowered to do if we are going for “unity.” The lack of science literacy is resulting in many of the divisions in the USA, and if governments and corporations desire nonprofits to address science misinformation and lack of trust through volunteerism, they need to be prepared to fund the activities needed to train staff to make that happen, and to give staff the time to make that happen. .

So, governments and corporations: are you ready to invite nonprofits to the table, as well as to fund all that’s necessary for this monumental task of unity?

Also, see:

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Nope, volunteering is not always inherently “good”

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graphic by Jayne Cravens representing volunteers

I have to start this blog with three disclaimers, because if I don’t, I will get accused of hating volunteerism, hating charity and not liking days of service:

  • First: yes, I support volunteering. I am, in fact, a passionate supporter of volunteer engagement. I believe nonprofits, NGOs, charities and any community-focused initiative should create roles and task for volunteers, specifically, and should have an ongoing commitment to volunteer engagement. If I didn’t believe that, I would not have devoted a significant portion of my career, my web site and my blog to the factors for success in volunteer engagement.
  • Second: No, I am not opposed to all charity. Sometimes, absolutely, the best thing to do in a situation is to provide temporary relief, like food or a tent. But I do have some reservations about people’s emphasis on charity rather than transformation.

Jerome Tennille has recently tweeted:

The road to hell is lined with good intentions. The statement is even true when about the act of volunteering. Volunteerism is a social construct that’s taught, when done thoughtlessly (with good intentions) can result of negative outcomes. January 13, 2020.

and

The act of volunteering is a social construct. This is taught to us. But, maybe we need to unlearn some of what we understand about it. Why? Because it’s not universally valued globally. Maybe we need to reimagine it philosophically. January 12, 2020.

Both were tweeted in association with his recent blog: The Misunderstood Social Construct That “Does Good”. And for many, this is NOT going to be an easy blog to read. But anyone who wants to promote volunteerism, and in particular, any corporate program that wants to mobilize its employees to volunteer for a cause or any individual that wants to mobilize friends or fellow students to volunteer, really needs to read Jerome’s blog, which says, in part:

We must decouple community service from holidays and societally prescribed dates in history, then position volunteering as something to do based on need year-round and think about our place in solving an issue and whether that conflicts with our (or others) expectations.

It is something I’ve been blogging about for a while myself, and NOT to much fanfare – in fact, I’ve made some people mad for daring to question some volunteerism initiatives and activities by volunteers themselves, especially DIY volunteers. Here are the blogs I’ve written over the years on a related note:

And that list excludes most of what I’ve written about the ethics of voluntourism – of people paying to “volunteer” abroad – or of the growing number of anti-volunteerism initiatives (yes, there are initiatives opposed to some or all volunteering (unpaid work).

Absolutely, there is an entitlement regarding volunteerism, even domestic volunteering, that I find really, really distasteful, patriarchal, colonialist, classist and, at times, racist. And I’m so, so happy to not be alone in this feeling.

Keep asking the hard questions, Jerome.

January 20, 2021 update: After tweeting about this blog, someone suggested I read the 2006 piece “What We Don’t Talk About When We Don’t Talk About Service” by Adam Davis, which proposes that volunteering / community service is an expression of how we “cherish inequality.” An excerpt: “I want to call into question the assumption or conclusion that Service Is Good (SIG)… Here is an exaggerated pass at the relation between inequality and service: I serve you because I want to; I choose to. You receive my service because you have to; you need it. I live in the realm of freedom; you live in the realm of necessity. Serving you, I confirm my relative superiority. Being served, you confirm your inferiority… Do acts of service move us toward equality? Might some acts of service enshrine and even extend the very gap they mean to bridge?” A good piece, if a bit too lengthy.

If you have benefited from this blog or other parts of my web site or my YouTube videos 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.