Tag Archives: epidemic

Recruiting Volunteers To Serve in Difficult, Dangerous or Controversial Roles

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There are people who want to volunteer in difficult or dangerous roles – it’s what they specifically seek out. Over on the Reddit group regarding voluntourism, as I write this blog, there are lots of messages from people, mostly young people, seeking to help on the “front lines” regarding people affected by COVID-19, either because they are ill or because they are isolated and needing help in lockdowns. Many online recruitment sites, like VolunteerMatch, have curated volunteering opportunities posted on their site that related to COVID-19 in some way, due to overwhelming demand from potential volunteers.

Some volunteering is perceived as difficult by potential volunteers and the general public, because of the clients that volunteers will work with or the kind of activities volunteers must undertake. Examples: serving as a Big Brother/Big Sister, mentoring a foster child, assisting adults with developmental disabilities, volunteering in a shelter for women experiencing domestic violence, or staffing a suicide hotline.

Some volunteering is perceived as difficult AND dangerous, such as fire fighting, search and rescue, volunteering with incarcerated people in a jail or prison or volunteering with people who are formerly-incarcerated.

Some volunteering is perceived as controversial, such as providing water stations in the desert for people entering a country illegally and can die from dehydration, or defending a women’s health clinic patients from protesters, or various protest and activism roles.

Difficult, dangerous and/or controversial roles actually appeal to many people who want to volunteer: they feel strongly about the cause, or they want to do something substantial and challenging. But other roles may seem too intimidating to new recruits, like mentoring a young person going through the foster care system, working with young people in the juvenile justice system, working with people with intellectual disabilities, or working with seniors.

How do you recruit for roles that might seem difficult, dangerous, even controversial? How do you recruit for a subject area or role that might provoke an initial reaction of fear among potential volunteers?

This web page, on my site, offers detailed advice.

Also see:

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Three resources for your COVID-19-related volunteering

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Lots of nonprofits, charities, government programs and others are rapidly re-aligning their volunteer engagement because of COVID-19 and home quarantines:

  • Converting some programming and volunteer engagement online.
  • Launching new virtual “home visit” or online mentoring programs.
  • Mobilizing volunteers to support people in-need because of home quarantine, because of the stress of their professional work in response to the pandemic, etc.

Here are three resources for these new or re-imagined efforts:

(1) This short video about the importance of safety measures in any virtual volunteering programs, including virtual “home visits”, virtual visits to those in senior homes, etc. Spoiler alert: it’s my video.

(2) After a natural disaster – earthquake, flood, tornado, hurricane, etc. – affected areas can be flooded with spontaneous volunteers. They present a lot of challenges – and even dangers. COVID-19 is presenting a similar flood of spontaneous volunteers. How to deal with that flood of goodwill? These resources on dealing with spontaneous volunteers in natural disasters can offer some guidance.

(3) These recommendations regarding volunteers in post-disaster situations (hurricanes, tornadoes, earthquakes, etc.) from Chapter 5: Discussion, Conclusions, and Recommendations, in Disaster Survivors’ Experiences with Disaster Volunteers by Christa Frances Lopez / Christa López Sandelier (it’s her doctoral dissertation for Walden University).

Except:

The data from the findings confirm that disaster survivors had positive and negative interactions with the disaster volunteers. The disaster survivors weighted the positive experiences over the negative experiences. Participant 8 stated that she did not want to talk about the negative experiences, while another was very specific about concerns about the disaster volunteers’ skill levels and fitness for working in the climate in Texas. There were several recommendations for training of disaster volunteers with a clear expression from the research participants that stopping to listen and have clear communication with the disaster survivors was a high priority, as stated by Participant 1, “Listen to the people.” While Participant 3 stated, “just know that the people that you’re working for or they’re in a bad place and you’re there to make it better and always remember, to smile.” Participant 6 mentioned,

It depends on the tenure or the experience of the group coming in. Whereas you have other folks who just have a heart and they show up and mistakes do come out of those, they walk into situations- working on projects that weren’t priorities like trees down in yards when other houses had trees fallen on roofs into bedrooms. And so that kind of misstep of a volunteer coming to do good being directed by the homeowner as opposed to being directed by a group. I saw a lot of that happen because people show up, they don’t know where to go. They end up getting questioned in by a group of neighbors that are out front. Well, there needs to be a leader of each group who has some knowledge of construction or safety.

This emphasized the need for effective volunteer coordination with focus on organization and leadership for the established volunteer groups and the emerging volunteers so that work can be prioritized….

The cultural fit using Campinha-Bacote’s (2002) model of culture competence may be best applied in the future at the volunteer reception centers where coordinators of the volunteers could provide training before the volunteers go into the field to work. This training could involve an intake assessment that asks questions about the volunteer and their reasons and intent for coming to volunteer for that particular disaster. This would help volunteers look inward and fit within the first construct of cultural awareness. The questionnaire could then build upon the next construct of cultural knowledge by asking what the volunteer knows about the community. That could then lead into the topics the volunteer center can focus on for the volunteers’ training before they work in the field. During this training there can be a brief on the culture of the community, such as, what the community was like before the disaster, what is like now, including stages of grief the disaster survivors may be experiencing and other information pertinent to the local community…

As mentioned in the recommendations, using Campinha-Bacote’s (2002) model of culture competence may be best applied in the future at the volunteer reception centers where coordinators of the volunteers could provide training before the volunteers go into the field to work. This training could involve an intake assessment, as well, to assess the volunteer motivation to gauge their culture awareness by looking inward at their own self-awareness as to what motivates them to volunteer. The training could then provide information about the local community norms and provide cultural knowledge to the volunteers so that they can know who they are serving, and thus improve service and cultural integration of the volunteers within the community…

(end excerpt)