United States

One of the least-researched areas of volunteer involvement in the United States is that of ethnic volunteering. Hispanic volunteering, in particular, has received much less attention than it deserves considering the vast increase in size and importance of the Hispanic population of the United States.

This qualitative study, by Safrit and Lopez, is one of the few efforts to examine Hispanic reactions to volunteering.

Mary Wiser, innovative director of volunteer services at the Courage Center in Minnesota, lost her fight with cancer but remains in the memory of the many volunteer program managers who saw her as a mentor. Unfortunately, Mary was not a writer, but her friends have culled her files and share some of her remaining training materials and other words of wisdom.

The refrain is heard time and time again in the groups and organizations of modern society. Schools have been crying out for ages about the shortage of math and science teachers. Corporations have been wailing about the lack of skilled workers. Community issues go un-addressed for lack of passionate people. There is a leadership crisis; a volunteer crisis, a "can't find the person I need when I need them" crisis. Why such a shortage of people?

Yet people increasingly ask us, "Why aren't there more leaders?" Why are people reluctant to answer the cry for leadership? ... We believe this cautiousness results not from a lack of courage or competence but from outdated notions about leadership. (Kouzes, Posner. The Leadership Challenge)

The fiasco of the United States Presidential Election 2000 in Florida made a mockery of a democracy's fundamental activity: voting.  Mountains of paperwork analyzing what went wrong with election technology or election laws have accumulated in election offices, legislatures and courtrooms around the nation. "Hanging chads" and "recounts" became household expressions - and justly so.  Some elections districts had error rates as high as 5 percent, far greater than President George W. Bush's margin of victory. Technological and legal issues clearly needed attention to revive Americans' flagging confidence in the elections system after the controversy, as post-election polls showed.

What most of the analysis by government task forces, academics and pundits largely has overlooked, however, has been the role poor poll worker management played in causing problems on Election Day. The evidence, which ranged from the comic to the shocking, was everywhere. In one case, a poll worker accidentally took a bag of ballots home after mistaking it for his laundry. Poll workers in other Florida voting districts improperly turned away voters from the polls, mishandled machinery that led to vote-calculation errors, or weren't able to instruct voters on how to properly operate voting machines. Incidents like these indicate that, in addition to modernizing election equipment and updating old laws, governments should take a cue from the business community in recognizing "people problems" in their organizations. "Senior executives are beginning to devote the necessary attention to understand the links between human activities and desired business outcomes," Jessica Korn of the Gallup Organization said:

In terms of elections, the "business outcomes" are reducing the number of errors made during elections and making voting as painless as possible for voters. And while the business world can help point out the malady, the volunteer community can shed light on actionable solutions. The nature of poll workers' jobs makes volunteer-management principles in four areas - attitude and motivation, recruitment, training, and evaluation - especially apropos for improving the election process.

After dispensing with some helpful definitions, this paper will describe common election routines and how to apply volunteer-management best practices. The goal isn't to lambaste elections administrators - many of whom have made admirable innovations in election management or face significant barriers to reform - but to suggest ways they might better meet the needs and expectations of the public.

Print periodicals in our field emerged in the late 1960s. What were the topics of interest back then? Browse the tables of contents of the forerunners of today's publications and discover what has changed--and what hasn't.

Research for the report, Flying Under the Radar: The Significant Work of All-Volunteer Organizations, was conducted in 1999 in the San Francisco service area of CompassPoint by Cristina Chan, M.P.P., and Sonali Rammohan, C.P.A. Leadership for the study was provided by Jan Masaoka, Executive Director of CompassPoint. I first became aware of the study when I attended a workshop presented by Cristina and Sonali at the 1999 National Community Service Conference. It was very telling that, in a conference of nearly 2,800 participants, there were only about a dozen attendees at this particular workshop. Obviously, not many all-volunteer group representatives were at the conference! When I was discussing the study with CompassPoint Executive Director Jan Masaoka, she used a term that to me describes why the health and well being of all-volunteer groups are so vitally important for our consideration. She called the sub-sector a "fragile ecology" that is little understood and very much under-supported by any of the primary sectors of modern life. This is despite the fact that these groups really create the rich fabric of what we call "community" and bring people together in so many ways. 

Is there a big blind spot in volunteer management? Consider:

• the elderly gentleman in the park, feeding pigeons or even squirrels
• a woman regularly looking in on a sick neighbor
• a teenager teaching other young people how to skateboard
• the police officer (definitely not as part of his official job) finding time to stop for a friendly chat with a troubled young person
• the helpful giver of directions to confused tourists

...and a whole host of other such “natural helpers” and doers of daily decencies, enriching virtually every neighborhood. To all these I would add the Dreamers who “go for it” to achieve their personal vision or goal. Often they are not paid for trying, just as often the goal itself is not defined primarily or at all in financial terms. So Dreamers, too, are often volunteers, though they rarely think of themselves in such terms. Moreover, my experience is that most of their goals have direct or indirect positive social implications. Even where the goals seem primarily to serve the Dreamer personally, I would argue that a happy society can be seen in many ways as the sum of fulfilled individuals.

People in the above examples could be thought of as "self-employed volunteers" in the sense that their helping behavior is not just unpaid, but is also primarily "on their own": freely chosen and accomplished, without benefit of bosses, managers, supervisors, rules or regulations, and typically without significant organizational support. There is always accountability, or should be. But for the self-employed volunteer, this accountability is virtually entirely to the client or goal served, not to any boss or agency.

Recent events have made the public more aware of the role of volunteers in protecting lives and property during fires and emergencies. Throughout the U.S. and many other countries around the world, communities (particularly small, rural ones) depend on citizens to assume those duties. These volunteer roles demand extensive training, time and commitment. In these days of busy lives and young people leaving their small communities in large numbers, how are these all-volunteer or combination staff-volunteer fire stations faring? This article will examine the issues, and how these programs are adapting to changing times while remaining true to their volunteer roots!