Tag Archives: teenagers

Trusting teen volunteers with leadership – would you?

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WA Co Oregon sheriff logoI love it when an organization’s representative says that the reason they involve volunteers for particular tasks is “because volunteers are the best people for those tasks.” Not because of the myth that volunteers are “free” and “save money.”

But it’s so rare that I hear anyone say that.

I had one of these rare moments recently at the Washington County, Oregon Sheriff’s citizens academy, when the topic of the Sheriff’s Office search and rescue team was discussed in detail. The positions on the sheriff’s primary search and rescue team are reserved for teen volunteers. You read that right: THESE POSITIONS ARE RESERVED FOR TEEN VOLUNTEERS. Not paid adults, not reserve deputies – TEEN VOLUNTEERS. This team is the PRIMARY search and rescue team for this area – not an auxiliary. The search and rescue team looks for (and finds!) lost people, downed aircraft, evidence in major crimes, and more. The members are highly trained and particularly-trained. They must be 14 to 19 years old, meet all of the minimum requirements, complete the intensive training academy, and make a minimum 2-year commitment.hey “age out” of the program in December following their 21st birthday.

So why is such an important, essential, life-saving, high-responsibility investigative program reserved for teen volunteers? I asked the organizer during the presentation. His reply, according to my notes, “Because they will do absolutely anything. They will get down on their hands and knees, side by side, and slowly crawl across a football field in cold weather, literally with their noses to the ground, looking for a bullet casing linked to a crime. They will thoroughly search an area with young, sharp eyes. They will come when called, even when it’s 3 a.m., and get right to work, and they will follow directions exactly – and in this work, they MUST follow their directions and training exactly. Because we can absolutely rely on them.”

Yes, of course there are older people that could be just as committed… I hear those “we shouldn’t make sweeping generalizations about different age groups!” thoughts out there, I do. And I’m sure there are other reasons that these teens make such great volunteers – because they don’t have family commitments, they don’t have job commitments, they have the flexibility and support to do these intensive activities, they aren’t plagued by the physical constraints that many of us older folks are (I can’t barely get up off the ground anymore, let alone crawl across such), and on and on.

But consider how refreshing it is to hear someone talk this way about teenagers. In all of my time working in volunteer management research and consulting – two decades – I have never heard anyone say that teenagers were the best people for a particular volunteering role. I’ve just heard over and over why teens cannot do this or that, or shouldn’t do this or that, why older volunteers don’t want to work with them, how they don’t take their commitment seriously, and on and on and on.

If the Washington County Sheriff’s Department thinks so highly of teen volunteers, and you don’t… if they are having such great success with teen volunteers in such high responsibility roles and you aren’t… what is it that they might be doing that you aren’t?

Keeping volunteers safe – & keeping everyone safe with volunteers

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I am thrilled to have just discovered that some of my favorite resources for helping to keep volunteers safe, and keeping everyone safe with volunteers, are now available for FREE – just download them!

One is Kidding Around? Be Serious! A Commitment to Safe Service Opportunities for Young People. It discussed “risk relevant characteristics” of adolescents and children – knowledge that was especially helpful when I was creating and advising on online mentoring programs -, offers a realistic, effective risk management process for dealing with young people, and reviews how to approach different service scenarios involving young participants. If you have young volunteers working together in particular, this book is a MUST read.

Another resource that is now free to download is Screening Volunteers to Prevent Child Sexual Abuse: A Community Guide for Youth Organizations. There are explicit guidelines on interactions between individuals, detailed guidance on monitoring behavior, advice on training staff, volunteers and youth themselves about child sexual abuse prevention, and exactly how to respond to inappropriate behavior, breaches in policy, and allegations and suspicions of child sexual abuse. I really can’t say enough fantastic things about this book.

And still another resource is Safe to Compete: An Introduction to Sound Practices for Keeping Children Safer in Youth-Serving Organizations. This document from the National Center for Missing & Exploited Children, published in 2013, is a framework for youth-serving organizations to guide their development of a sexual abuse prevention program.

Combine these three books with Beyond Police Checks: The Definitive Volunteer & Employee Screening Guidebook by Linda Graff, available from Energize, Inc. (but not for free), and you’ve got a solid, more-than-basic understanding of risk management in volunteer engagement activities. I really can’t say enough fantastic things about Graff’s book. It completely changed my view of safety in volunteering programs, both for clients and for volunteers themselves – the over-reliance on police checks for safety continues, sometimes with tragic consequences.

Three of these resources are “old”, however, I have had no trouble whatsoever easily adapting their recommendations to online scenarios with volunteers (virtual volunteering). The “old” books were a wake-up call for me regarding the vulnerability of teens, women and people with disabilities, and I carried that new knowledge into my recommendations regarding virtual volunteering, starting in the 1990s and continuing to this day.

And if you are promoting virtual volunteering, digital volunteering, micro volunteering, whatever, these books are a MUST read before you utter another word!

July 16, 2020 update: Prepared by Volunteer Canada for Public Safety Canada Community Safety and Partnerships Branch, The Screening Handbook (to screen volunteers) from March 2012 is a free online publication that provides “a comprehensive resource to help organizations revise and develop screening policies and practices. Screening is considered to be an essential component of sound human resource management. It is broadly defined as an ongoing process that helps better match people and organizations, improves the safety and quality of programs, and reduces risks and liability… Screening practices play a critical role for organizations in fulfilling their moral, legal, and ethical responsibilities to all those they reach, including members, clients, participants, employees, and volunteers. This obligation is even greater when they are working with vulnerable people, including children, youth, people with disabilities, and senior adults… Organizations should have comprehensive and ongoing screening practices in place that recognize the importance and value of all the relevant steps in determining the right fi t for an assignment. To rely solely on Police Checks as the only screening protocol is to ignore other important and valuable sources of relevant information.

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