United States

Gwen Fujie calls it “martial arts ideas for the mind and mouth.”  In this article, Fujie explains why “Tongue Fu!” leads to cooperative communication and more peaceful relationships, both essential elements to success in volunteering. Based on author Sam Horn’s popular book by the same name, Fujie argues that Tongue Fu! is the “constructive alternative to giving a tongue-lashing or to being tongue-tied, a step-by-step process for turning hostility into harmony and aggravation into aloha.”  

In this quarter's issue, Harrison discusses her "logic model of decision making," designed to guide managers of volunteer resources through the steps and choices associated with managing virtual volunteering. This interview is a follow-up to Harrison’s interview in the last quarter of e-Volunteerism, where she discussed the misconceptions about virtual volunteering. 

In June 1979, Pennsylvania’s “First Annual Symposium on Volunteerism and Education” was convened in Harrisburg.  The keynote address was delivered by Gordon Manser, co-author of the 1976 book, Voluntarism at the Crossroads.  We dust off and republish his speech here, allowing us to look back through the prism of 31 years at the issues he predicted would affect our field in the coming decades.  Some – such as the impact of the gasoline shortage at that time or Proposition 13 in California – have evolved into somewhat different challenges.  Other themes continue to be very pertinent today.

After more than a decade of promoting virtual volunteering or online service as an important new development (which it is) for the volunteer field, it's time to step back and look at what is really happening as organizations put the theory into practice.  Yvonne D. Harrison, Assistant Professor of Nonprofit Leadership at Seattle University, has done some innovative research on virtual volunteering, particularly in Canada.  She also wrote her PhD dissertation on the subject and is devoted to helping practitioners understand the theoretical foundation of their work. In this interview with e-Volunteerism, Yvonne tackles misconceptions about virtual volunteering by sharing her research on such issues as how much is going on, who actually engages in it and how they engage, the appropriateness of virtual assignments and management implications, among other points.

How do you avoid having to sell a solution or future direction that the management or leadership team has created? Because it IS a sell job when a few people decide on a new way for the many.  When there are circumstances where any answer is a potential right answer – and there is a large group of stakeholders invested in that answer – there is another way:  large group interventions (LGI).  Instead of training people on a new direction and having to parry objections and dissatisfactions, including them in the creation process avoids the uphill battle.

There are several designs for large group participative events:  Search Conferences, Future Search Conferences, Open Space Technology, Real Time Strategic Change, World Café, and the Technology of Participation, to name some of the most popular.   There are some basic principles behind all of these techniques that are discussed in this article, along with specific design ideas when using the search conference method.

While most attention was fixed on the human beings caught in the devastation of Hurricane Katrina, there were many who immediately realized the plight of animals – especially family pets – who were truly in a life-or-death situation at the same time.  The Humane Society of the United States became coordination headquarters for weeks, first engaged in rescuing animals; then housing, feeding, and caring for them; and finally either reuniting them with their owners or finding and transporting them to new homes.  More than 10,000 animals were rescued and cared for in Louisiana and Mississippi alone. 

 

Betsy McFarland, Director of Communications in the Companion Animals Section of the Humane Society of the United States, also serves as the national staff member tasked with volunteer-related matters.  Without warning, Betsy’s office because deluged with offers for help from a special type of “spontaneous disaster volunteer”:  people who would drop everything to help animals in need.  It took weeks of unremitting activity and effort to cope, all with extraordinary volunteers. 

Listen to Betsy’s story in her own words in this audio interview.

 

A “linear community” stretching over two thousand miles up and down the eastern United States, the Appalachian Trail was first conceived in the 1920s and completed in 1951.  From first to last, it was a project of volunteer initiative and ingenuity – and continues today to be a unique participatory wilderness experience, maintained by volunteers and engaging its almost 3 million hikers per year in communal sharing through written registers and chance encounters. 

Dr. Ethel Percy Andrus, the first woman high school principal in the state of California, knew that retired teachers were living on incredibly small pensions, often without any health insurance. In 1947, she founded the National Retired Teachers Association (NRTA).   But it wasn’t until 1956, after approaching more than 30 companies to offer health insurance to retired teachers, that she found one willing to take a chance on NRTA members.  The organization then expanded its membership to all retirees and became AARP in 1958.

Dr. Andrus was a remarkable volunteer.  Read her story.