Tag Archives: pandemic

Volunteering during the holidays during a pandemic

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graphic by Jayne Cravens representing volunteers

The question will be coming soon, at least in North America: how can I, or my entire family, volunteer to help others during the holidays – Thanksgiving and Christmas – during this pandemic?

First, know that nonprofits, even when there is not a pandemic, are deluged with people looking for a feel-good, heart-warming, short-term volunteering experience that makes them feel like they are helping others, that they can bring along their kids, maybe take some selfies… and some nonprofits are willing to create these opportunities because programs can use them to educate the volunteers about hunger, homelessness, etc. and get some financial donations. But these holiday opportunities fill up QUICKLY. In non-pandemic times, I advise potential volunteers to look for holiday volunteering opportunities in the summer because these roles fill up so quickly.

What’s the landscape like during the pandemic for holiday volunteering, especially with a family? Even smaller, in terms of opportunities.

If you want to volunteer during the holidays, onsite rather than online, your best bet is to focus on local Meals on Wheels programs and food banks, and to be flexible with many different days and times you are available in November and December. Look into requirements to volunteer NOW – the web sites of various programs should have complete details. If you can volunteer for more than one day, all the better – it’s a lot of investment to train and screen volunteers, and it’s much easier to involve volunteers who will come a few times, not just once.

You can also start taking inventory of your own immediate neighborhood. Do you know who your neighbors are? Do you know their Thanksgiving plans? In talking to your neighbors (socially-distanced and with a mask, of course), do you find any that will be alone for Thanksgiving? Would they be open to your bringing them a Thanksgiving Day meal, or a meal on some other day? What about making five chicken pot pies or some other thing that can be homemade and frozen and giving them to neighbors to use/eat whenever they want to? Or some bags of groceries (including toilet paper)? People who are far from family, who live alone – some are elderly, some are foreign students, and on and on – are probably all around you.

Is there a church, temple or mosque nearby, and would they be able to match you with a family or a single person in need that would welcome a meal or bags of groceries? This will probably be done anonymously – you probably won’t get to meet the family unless you are already a member of that community of faith.

What about neighbors that have dogs – are there any that have trouble walking their dog and would welcome you and your family walking their dogs some days over the holidays?

Do you have neighbors who are homebound – elderly, people living in a home for people with disabilities, etc. – who would enjoy chalk art drawings on the sidewalks outside their homes?

I’m really good at creating volunteering opportunities that are skills-based and project-based, that are about more sustainable results, not so much charity. But charity is what most volunteers want to do over the holidays. So, the above are my ideas. What are yours? What are you planning to do over the holidays to volunteer safely during the pandemic? Please offer ideas in the comments below.

More: Volunteering in the time of the novel coronavirus/COVID-19

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A review of The Last Virtual Volunteering Guidebook

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How did I miss this wonderful 2014 review by Thomas W. McKee of The Last Virtual Volunteering Guidebook: Fully Integrating Online Service into Volunteer Involvement, a book I co-wrote with Susan Ellis? Somehow I did – I just recently found it on the Amazon page for the book:

Since most books on technology are outdated by the time the ink dries on the printed version, I teased Susan Ellis about using the word “LAST” in the title of a book about virtual volunteering. She assured me, however, that the word “LAST” was carefully chosen for a very specific purpose. After reading the book, I now understand the wisely chosen word “LAST.” The authors do acknowledge that the technology tools we use today will change, but the principles outlined will always apply to future virtual volunteering because Guidebook is not just another book on technology. It is a book on the integration of technology into all aspects of volunteer engagement so that organizations avoid the silo compartmentalization of virtual vs. traditional volunteers.

Wow. This is exactly how Susan and I tried to write this book!

What we don’t mean is that there will or should never be a further need to write or talk about the latest developments in engaging volunteers online.

What we do mean is that, from this moment on, we hope that talk about virtual volunteering won’t be segregated to a separate book or separate chapter at the end of a book about volunteer management. Our dream is that this is a turning point regarding talk and training about volunteer engagement, and

  • any book about volunteer management, whether it’s a book about basic principals in general, group volunteering, episodic volunteering, skills-based volunteering, teen volunteering, whatever, has advice about using the Internet to support and involve volunteers integrated throughout the material.
  • any workshop about some aspect of volunteer management, whether it’s about the fundamentals of volunteer management, recruitment, risk management, adults working with children, whatever, fully integrates advice about using the Internet as a part of those activities.

In short, NO MORE SEGREGATION OF INTERNET-MEDIATED VOLUNTEERING in books about volunteer management, in workshops about volunteer management, and in references to volunteer engagement, as a whole. Virtual volunteering should not be an “add on” in any of these scenarios – not only in a book or training about volunteer engagement, but also, not in any volunteer engagement scheme at any organization. In fact, our dream is that we no longer hear about onsite volunteers as one group and online volunteers as another, separate group when talking about how to work with volunteers – how about we talk about volunteers, period? The exception: research. Absolutely, let’s have research on virtual volunteering, specifically – but NOT the motivation of online volunteers (enough!). Let’s have research that organizations actually need. What do they need? ASK THEM.

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

The Last Virtual Volunteering Guidebook: Fully Integrating Online Service Into Volunteer Involvement is available both as a traditional print book and as an e-book. Tools come and go, but certain community engagement/volunteer management principles never change. 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. Reviews assignment creation, changes you will need to make to policies and procedures, how to evaluate your program’s effectiveness, how to build a sense of team among online volunteers and so, so much more. And if you are a volunteer at a school or a concerned parent of a student at a school and you know that school might be considering online mentoring or online tutoring, I hope you will consider buying The Last Virtual Volunteering Guidebook and giving it to the volunteer coordinator at the school, who may not have the budget for such.

We published this six years before COVID-19 / the novel coronavirus, and never thought about how a global pandemic, social distancing and home quarantines would lead to a sudden, urgent rise in interest in virtual volunteering. I’m just glad the book is seeing such renewed interest (far more have been sold this year, in 2020, than even in the first year it was published).

Also see:

Why did we call it the LAST guidebook?

LinkedIn Group for the discussion of virtual volunteering.

When Words Get in the Way (Like “Virtual Volunteering”)

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:

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. 

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)