United States

It’s hard to talk about corporate volunteerism without imagining painful stereotypes: standalone projects, third-party organizing services, hosting 200 employees for an ad hoc event, one-time events for skilled professionals, staged photo ops, reporting via the company’s digital CSR tool, hunting for grant dollars, other mutually performative behaviors, and so on and so forth.

We read a lot about volunteer engagement and leadership from the perspective of agencies who have paid Volunteer Managers – those who oversee, manage and coordinate the efforts of the volunteer team who are committed to support the work of their agency. In those conversations, it’s often easy to forget that the vast amount of volunteer leadership occurs in ‘all volunteer’-led organisations, where there is no paid staff member to take control and where the challenges can sometime be different from having a single person designated to that leadership role.