Multinational (by contributors from 3 or more countries)

During the last year, e-Volunteerism presented a number of retrospectives, looking at what happened in volunteering over the last decade. Now it’s time to look forward. 

Though Susan Ellis and Steve McCurley use their quarterly Points of View as an outlet for their opinions, the journal’s feature section editors generally keep their personal thoughts out of the pieces they edit. We decided that this special, re-designed issue was a great opportunity to share the voices and varied perspectives of our far-flung editors – professionals who are all deeply immersed in the field of volunteerism as authors, trainers, consultants and volunteer-involving agency executives, representing the United States (both coasts), England and Australia.

In this Voices, we ask each of our editors to respond to the following question: 

What volunteering trends and issues are you keeping your eye on that have the greatest implications or potential for the volunteering field in the next few years?

The responses are presented in recorded audio clips, so you can hear their “voices” for  yourself.

Established in 1964 and held every year in Western Australia, the Dowerin Field Day is an effort to find ways to prevent the small, wheat belt community of Dowerin from becoming a ghost town and to raise funds for improved community facilities. In an attempt to engender community backing for the project, organizers decided to “pay” each volunteer who contributes time to the event, by way of a cheque presented to a local charity or project chosen by the volunteer. As the Field Day's Web site says, "It was and continues to be a masterstroke in distributing much needed funds to deserving organisations across Western Australia’s wheat belt."

Should volunteers be paid for their time and efforts? Is the method a “masterstroke” to cleverly distribute money to deserving organizations? In this Keyboard Roundtable, leading commentators Susan J. Ellis, Steve McCurley, Jayne Cravens, Martin J. Cowling, Andy Fryar, Linda Graff and Betty Stallings debate the pros and cons of this and other alternate economy projects, which translate the hours contributed by volunteers into real cash.

In 1996, Ivan Scheier wrote a series of articles for the “Grapevine” newsletter which challenged volunteer administrators to consider the pros and cons of using the term 'volunteer' in describing the work that our profession undertakes. In the article, titled “Volunteer Administration: An Emerging Misnomer” (http://academic.regis.edu/volunteer/ivan/sect01/sect01b.htm), Ivan suggested that those of us leading volunteer resources were often guiding the work of many people not readily identified as volunteers. He believed we were working with both a credit gap and an identity gap in the sector and often sought ideas about how we could overcome these shortfalls.

In the ensuing decade, our profession has continued to grow. We now involve even more volunteers from areas not traditionally associated with volunteering, while involving people whose motivations are less and less altruistic by the day. We have also continued to debate whether the term 'volunteer' is outdated and needs a complete revamping.

Ivan Scheier was many things to many people – a colleague, a presenter, a mentor, a clever writer – but he was always one unquestionable thing to everyone he met: one of the true American pioneers of the field of volunteerism.

 In this collection of first-person stories, people who knew Ivan best reminisce about this remarkable man and the impact of his work in volunteerism. They talk about his Challenge Think Tanks and Mini-Max training process, along with his quiet and unassuming manner and the near genius of his ideas. In this unique tribute, it’s easy to see why Ivan is described as the one person who always saw the volunteer profession from 35,000 feet above the ground.  Ivan Scheier, according to those who knew him, always saw the big picture.

In this Keyboard Roundtable, we’ll explore one of the perennial issues of volunteerism:  When should work be done by volunteers and when should it be done by paid staff?   Convening Editor Rob Jackson brings together a range of perspectives to explore this issue. Our participants will look at why we have differing views from each other on this important topic, and what common ground we can find between proponents of volunteering and those whose goal is to defend the rights of paid workers.

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 task, such as painting a community centre)  to volunteering that makes use of an individual employee’s professional skills (providing professional Human Resources support, for example). On top of this, anecdotal evidence seems to indicate that the growth and popularity of employer-supported volunteering is not diminishing despite the global financial crisis.  

In Part 2 of this Keyboard Roundtable, we bring together leading employer-supported volunteering practitioners and thinkers to explore these and other key issues.  And, as we always do at e-Volunteerism, we give you a chance to share your thoughts and experiences on this important new trend in the volunteer field.

As e-Volunteerism enters its eighth year, it is clear that one of the original aims of this online journal project hasn’t been met: Namely, to get people in our field to interact more online.  Most of our online readers don’t make use of the interactive publishing features that make e-Volunteerism so valuable a resource to volunteer managers. In this Keyboard Roundtable, we explore why this might be. And along the way, we look at the whole issue of online interaction by people in the volunteerism field.