Engage Library
One of the fastest growing and most significant new ways of volunteering in the past 20 years has been volunteering through one’s workplace. Major corporations have created extensive programs to encourage and enable their employees to volunteer and this form of business social…
July 2009
The Internet increasingly provides a means for nonprofits and government organizations to engage with people in their circles of influence. More and more organizations are blogging and posting YouTube videos and, more importantly, a great many organizations are asking their…
July 2009
Over the years we’ve seen an impressive array of attempts to “re-conceptualize” volunteering, at least to re-name it. Last fall, the United States saw a flurry of special events, legislative proposals and media attention focused on the subject of “service.” It was brought to a…
July 2009
How does the depressed global economy translate into something positive for volunteering? In this e-Volunteerism feature, Marzia Baldassari, a member of the Volunteering Ireland Team and Coordinator of the Dublin City North Volunteer Centre, answers this question. With Ireland…
July 2009
Paula J. Beugen, an active leader in the field of volunteerism and volunteer resources management for more than three decades, has observed legislation passed in her home state of Minnesota from the 1980s to the present. In this e-Volunteerism feature, Beugen asks why the needs…
July 2009
The civic disengagement of youth has been a notable concern for policy makers and academics in Canada and around the world. In fact, today’s young people have been often described as the “civic deficit” generation, resulting in calls for new programs in civic education and…
July 2009
It’s official. YouTube isn’t just for silliness anymore. The richness and variety of the videos that people now post online are quite amazing, and so it should come as no surprise that volunteering is among the subjects represented. In this Voices from the Past, we’ll link…
April 2009
Over the last few years, we have seen employer-supported volunteering grow into a vital element of the volunteerism field around the world. More recently, we’ve begun to see a shift from the so-called “team challenge” approach to volunteering (where teams of employees perform a…
April 2009
Research To Practice takes its eye off research about volunteers in this issue and instead takes a look at that other vital resource – the people who look after volunteers. Call them managers or coordinators and any one of the myriad of other names that become attached to people…
April 2009
The Internet now offers a fascinating array of tools and techniques for managing volunteers – VolunteerMatch, Facebook, blogs, Vlogs, Wikis, Twitter and many others. In this Along the Web, we take a look at these and other cutting-edge tools. After a quick research review on…
April 2009
In these incredibly difficult economic times, there is perhaps one silver lining: volunteer resources. For those organizations wise enough to seize it, the economic crisis can be viewed as an opportunity to take advantage of the skills and ambitions that today’s volunteers have…
April 2009
We’ve worked diligently to raise the standards of volunteer management. But we shouldn’t lose sight of some of the things that make volunteering different from paid employment, and help capture the volunteer spirit. In the past decade or so, we’ve tackled two types of…
April 2009
When a volunteer walks through a manager’s door, each volunteer brings along a whole system of expectations, wishes and demands associated with the volunteer experience. Volunteer managers often recognize one category of expectations as the “fantasy world” of the volunteer.…
April 2009
In the spring of 2001, e-Volunteerism published a feature story about online training efforts called “Workshops the Wired Way.” Now, in our periodic feature series called “Whatever Happened To . . .”, e-Volunteerism revisits modern technology training and how it is used for…
April 2009
During this economic downturn, volunteer experience and accomplishments may be pivotal to getting a foot in the door for a paid job interview. It's important that volunteers know how to present relevant volunteer experience in a "business light" on a resume — whether it's a…
April 2009
During the 1980s, Ivan Scheier started a small publishing operation in Boulder, Colorado called Yellowfire Press. At Yellowfire, he produced a range of monographs and small booklets on subjects that interested him. In 1984, he wrote Meanwhile…Back at the Neighborhood, in which…
January 2009
This issue of Research to Practice takes a look at something that isn’t a typical research report and was written almost 30 years ago. Exploring Volunteer Space: The Recruiting of a Nation was Ivan Scheier’s greatest work – an exploration both of his own mind and of the universe…
January 2009
In his later years, Ivan Scheier finally learned how to use e-mail (at least in a sparing fashion) and to dabble in other parts of Web communication. He was definitely not a techie and probably not even comfortable with being a Web person, but you’ll still see his traces online…
January 2009
Ivan Scheier delighted in creating group exercises that allowed people to actively interact, have fun and still accomplish serious goals. One of his early and most popular training designs started out as “Mini-Max” and evolved over 20 years into other formats, notably the “Glad…
January 2009