Tag Archives: civility

Ensuring cultural & social interactions: as important as water, food & shelter.

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ACAPS is a nonprofit, nongovernmental project founded in 2009 with the aim of conducting independent, groundbreaking humanitarian analysis to help humanitarian workers, influencers, fundraisers and donors make better-informed decisions. ACAPS is not affiliated with the UN or any other organisation, allowing it to be a more neutral, critical voice regarding such initiative. ACAPS is overseen by a consortium of three NGOs: the Norwegian Refugee Council, Save the Children and Mercy Corps.

ACAPS published a report in May 2022, Life goes on in Yemen: Conversations with Yemeni families as the war nears its eighth year, that illustrates why humanitarian response cannot be just about providing water, food and shelter, and why it’s a mistake for charities to limit their communications with donors to only these needs. Water food and shelter are often called “basic needs”, but the reality is that social interactions, cultural practices and trust in the strength and work of institutions are all a part of basic human needs as well. The report is about Yemen, but it applies to every country.

This image is, to me, oh-so-powerful – and applies to every community, not just Yemen:

An image of a family as a part of a cycle that includes life-cycle events like weddings, deaths, births, etc., and the essential nature of having a social and cultural life.

This excerpt from the report is a good summary of what the image and the entire report is trying to say:

This research serves as a reminder that Yemenis are interested in more than just the satisfaction of their essential needs (such as water, food, and shelter). It highlights the diversity of households and the creative ways people adapt to economic challenges and accommodate long term strategic needs. Yemenis continue to participate in life-cycle events, celebrations, and social obligations. Having a social life maintains and creates networks and connections that build social capital, enhance the quality of life, and form the support network people can rely on when they most need it. Understanding the key role social capital plays in Yemeni life highlights that social capital is something built, maintained, stored, and used in a continuous cycle. Connections are important, but social capital is the glue that keeps these connections alive. When Yemenis keep celebrations modest by inviting fewer guests or keeping events shorter, they build less social capital. Similarly, they lose social capital when they hold fewer gatherings or visit extended family in their ancestral villages less.

So many people want to volunteer and/or donate financially to help people experiencing extreme poverty caused by social injustice, historic oppression and inequities and armed conflict. That should continue to be encouraged and cultivated – but people also need to understand that community development is every bit as important as charity and the provision of water, food and shelter.

Shout out to the Aidnography blog for bringing this to my attention.

Also see:

Decolonizing International Aid (including international volunteering).

humanitarian stories & photos – use with caution.

Extreme poverty is not beautiful.

Advice for teaching children compassion & understanding instead of pity with regard to poverty.

Nope, volunteering is not always inherently “good”.

Fun way to recognize a year’s worth of participation

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I’m a Reddit user, and in addition to being a part of a LOT of Reddit communities, I also moderate four subreddits, as a volunteer: one regarding volunteerism, one regarding inclusion, a subreddit to discuss community service, and the TechSoup subreddit. I’ve also joined a LOT of Reddit communities and spend way too much time reading them (and sometimes commenting).

So I was one of many reddit users that got a customized slide show “year in review” that Reddit sends to users (community members). And it’s a super fun way to recognize program participants.

Among the slides is one that shows that, in 2021, I scrolled the length of 35,495 bananas lying end-to-end:

A slide noting that in 2021, I scrolled the length of 35,494 bananas lying end-to-end, and proclaiing "The amount you scrolled is bananas."

There’s also a slide showing my most popular post in 2021 – it was to a subreddit I don’t frequent, the one for Portland, Oregon, and was how volunteers were urgently needed at cooling stations set up to help people deal with our 116 degree days (it got 218 “up votes”):

There was also a slide that showed how many hours I spent in 2021 in various subreddits – yes, I really did spend 123 hours, at LEAST, in the volunteers subreddit. The TwoXriders subreddit noted is for women motorcyclists, in case you were wondering, and the Malicious Compliance subreddit – that you will have to check out yourself:

There’s also a slide showing how many new communities I joined in 2021, how many user awards I got, and how many karma points (as Reddit calls it, fake Internet points) I got (pictured below):

What a fun way to recognize participation! Good ideas for honoring program participants and volunteers as well.

And note: they never said, “Your volunteering hours were the equivalent of this much money!” Because that’s a really, really bad idea.

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.

My 2021 summer teaching gig at Gratz College

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I am so pleased to announce that I will be teaching a course for Gratz College this summer: MGT 553 Using Technology to Build Community and Grow Your Organization. It is part of the college’s MS in Nonprofit Management. 

The 553 course will examine online networking tools that can be used to foster connectivity, communication, and collaboration in order to strengthen nonprofit and religious-based organizations. As someone that has been online since the early 1990s and still believes that online communities are the heart of the Internet, I could not be more excited to teach this course! I will use a mix of books, online readings, podcasts and my own audiovisual materials to explore how mission-based initiatives can use online tools to create a sense of community among donors, volunteers, clients, neighbors and partners, and how to attract new people to be a part of those communities. It’s a class about facilitation, trust-building, outreach, and working with humans – online. 

The original course was designed in 2016 by Dr. Deborah Kantor Nagler, who passed away because of COVID-19 in April 2020. It has been bittersweet to have this opportunity because of the global pandemic, and I have dedicated this revised course to Dr. Kantor, who I’m so sorry I never met.

Much has changed since this course was last taught and, of course, I have my own approach to the subject, so I’ve spent a LOT of time creating new lectures and lessons. Online community has gotten buried under ad-ridden web sites with questionable content, memes and hate speech. I hope my course helps students see the potential of online communities for the nonprofits they are affiliated with and plays even a small part in bringing back civility to the Internet.

Gratz College is based in Philadelphia. It just celebrated its 125th anniversary. The College’s historic focus is on Jewish studies and education, and it continues to be internationally recognized as a leader in developing effective educators, professionals, leaders and scholars, both within and beyond the Jewish community, with a broad commitment to the intellectual and professional growth of diverse constituencies, grounded in Jewish values. The college is renowned for its Holocaust and Genocide Studies. They also offer an M.A. in Human Rights, with courses in areas such as Civil Rights, Women’s Rights, Children’s Rights, Sexual Identity and Gender Rights and Refugee Rights.

Per the emphasis of the college, some of my examples of effectively using online tools to engage and build community will be from programs focused on historic genocides and prevention of genocide – you can see a list of Twitter accounts I will be featuring here (additions are welcomed).

I love teaching at the university level. It is one of my very favorite things to do, right up there with riding my motorcycle. My experience to date? I was the Fall 2015 Duvall Leader in Residence at the University of Kentucky’s Center for Leadership Development, teaching sessions on online leadership. I have also guest lectured at classes at Portland State University, the University of Texas at Austin, the University of Texas at Arlington School of Social Work and St. Edward’s University on both volunteer management-related topics, usually virtual volunteering, and on using online tools as a part of nonprofit service delivery and outreach. And I regularly train professionals in these and other topics: in 2020 alone, I created and delivered workshops for the University College Dublin Volunteers Overseas program, Centre d’étude et de coopération internationale / Centre for International Studies and Cooperation—CECI, the Iowa Commission on Volunteer Service, the USA Office of Healthcare Information & Counseling, the Points of Light Foundation / Corporation for National Service, America’s Service Commissions (ASC), and the Community Foundation of Henderson, Kentucky, among others (my busiest year as a trainer ever).

For the time being, I’ll also be continuing my very part-time role with TechSoup, helping to manage the TechSoup online community – introducing topics, answering community questions, trying to attract new participants and helping to move the community to a new platform before summer. Yes, joining and participating in the TechSoup community is going to be one of the assignments for my Gratz College students!

So, if you want to book me for a training or consultation, know that my schedule is very tight now and through August! And it’s also that time of year when I start getting contacted about leading workshops in the Fall, so it’s not too early to talk to me about my schedule after this class is done.

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

Of course, you can have on-demand training from me regarding virtual volunteering anytime, through my free videos on m YouTube channel and via my book, The Last Virtual Volunteering Guidebook. If you want to deeply integrate virtual volunteering into your program and expand your engagement of online volunteers, such as in an online mentoring program or other scheme where online volunteers will interact with clients, you will not find a more detailed guide anywhere for working with online volunteers and using the Internet to support and involve all volunteers – even after home quarantines are over and volunteers start coming back onsite to your workspace. And purchasing the book is far, far cheaper than hiring me as a consultant or trainer regarding virtual volunteering – though you can still do that!

Cultivating Online Civility

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When I began writing about online culture, back in the late 1990s, misinformation was at a minimum and easy to identify, and hateful trolls were oh-so-quickly banned from the online communities they tried to disrupt.

Now, hate and misinformation rage online, and not just among strangers – neighbors are raging against each other on local online communities.

Back in the 1990s, in promoting virtual volunteering – using the Internet to support and involve volunteers – people who were new to the Internet (yes, there used to be such people) would ask lots of questions about what it is like to work with people remotely, rather than onsite, in-person. I created a section of the Virtual Volunteering Project web site, and then my own web site, specifically to talk about online culture, about the different ways people expressed themselves online and how to appreciate those differences, and how to quickly ramp up your skills for working with others online. I linked to some netiquette guidelines, but didn’t put much emphasis at all on online civility, dealing with trolls or addressing misinformation.

My, how times have changed…

A recent Wall Street Journal investigation revealed that Facebook was aware of its Facebook groups feature’s polarizing tendencies as early as 2016, and the Facebook groups feature continues to serve as a vector for lies, especially regarding COVID-19, as this Wired article, Facebook Groups Are Destroying America, notes:

Facebook users have been seeing more content from “friends and family” and less from brands and media outlets… Dynamics in groups often mirror those of peer-to-peer messaging apps: People share, spread, and receive information directly to and from their closest contacts, whom they typically see as reliable sources. To make things easier for those looking to stoke political division, groups provide a menu of potential targets organized by issue and even location; bad actors can create fake profiles or personas tailored to the interests of the audiences they intend to infiltrate. This allows them to seed their own content in a group and also to repurpose its content for use on other platforms... Related memes and links to fringe right-wing websites have been shared millions of times on Facebook in the past few months. Users coordinating their activities across networks of groups and pages managed by a small handful of people boost these narratives. At least nine coordinated pages and two groups—with more than 3 million likes and 71,000 members, respectively—are set up to drive traffic to five “news” websites that promote right-wing clickbait and conspiracy theories. In May, those five websites published more than 50 posts promoting Obamagate, which were then shared in the linked pro-Trump groups and pages. The revolving door of disinformation continues to spin.

And that doesn’t even begin to address the problems with dedicated trolls – people who target others online with insults and harassment in an effort to drive the person offline.

I now have a curated list of resources on online civility, and I continue to update my long list of recommendations on how to address online misinformation, which I’ve been maintaining for more than two decades. I also now have a web page of resources regarding online harassment, defamation & libel, and I regularly share on the TechSoup Online Community about how women worldwide are the frequent targets of harassing trolls who dedicate their time to silencing those voices. I never dreamed back in the 1990s things would be so overwhelmingly negative now and these would be the highly critical issues that they are. But, here we are.

Can online civility be restored? Is it possible to challenge misinformation and destructive speech in the strongest, most deliberate of terms without being accused of hate speech yourself? Can there be rules for online civility that don’t stifle much-needed debate? I hope these curated resources can help answer those questions – but, honestly, based on what I’ve experienced myself this year, I’m deeply skeptical. Perhaps I need to create a list of resources on “Learning to live and thrive in a world with hateful, hate-filled people.”

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. 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 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 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.