United States

Like the proverbial phoenix that rises from the ashes, George Washington Carver Senior High School rose from the ravages of Hurricane Katrina. Over the decade since the storm, the community has seen the emergence of a new brand of school and a different way of teaching—along with a new group of caring people, reaching out and giving back to help restore the city. One such project is Big Class, an organization that goes into the city schools to help students with their writing and creative skills. Through the mentoring of noted poet, writer, and essayist Kiese Laymon, and a corps of other volunteers, the Carver students are now authors of a published book.

History Between the Folds: Personal Narratives by the 11th Grade at George Washington Carver Senior High School, published in May 2017, is written by the 11th grade students of Eric Parrie, a young, energetic history teacher at Carver, a predominately African-American, inner-city school. Parrie, who is white, brought with him a style of teaching that gives the students a chance to have a voice, to see history, and to make history. The book gives readers the opportunity to see into the hearts and minds of teenagers who were young children when Hurricane Katrina hit, and some teens new to the city. They share their personal experiences and feelings about life and their futures.

This very special e-Volunteerism feature, by writer and writing volunteer Willmarine B. Hurst, reveals the process of writing and publishing History Between the Folds, and explains how volunteers served as student writing mentors.

If you Google it, there are 10 times the number of articles on “volunteer recruitment” than “volunteer retention.” With the number of volunteers declining nationally, understanding the dynamics and rates of volunteer retention for different groups of volunteers is crucial.

In this Research to Practice, reviewer Laurie Mook presents the findings of several studies that investigate predictors of volunteer retention, with a special focus on a recent study that explores how volunteers’ feeling of “community service self-efficacy” (CSSE) affects their continued volunteer engagement. This study—based on results of a volunteer program assessment survey of volunteers in three U.S. nonprofit organizations—was influenced by research on students in service-learning courses. In terms of practice, a volunteer’s feeling of CSSE can be assessed in the recruitment process, and increases or decreases in CSSE measured periodically. As Mook explains, this information can be useful for developing and refining volunteer management practices that contribute to volunteer retention.

More people want to volunteer today than ever before. As practitioners, we recognize that it’s important to not just make volunteer opportunities more accessible but to also make them more personalized.

While some of us have yet to adopt a web-based approach to recruiting and working with volunteers, the conversation has already advanced to using more effective mobile apps. These apps offer more relevant opportunities to individual volunteers and also help automate check-in, background checking, and dynamic reporting processes. Today’s app developers aim beyond visual interfaces to target voice detection and artificial intelligence capabilities – such as those supported by Apple’s Siri, Amazon’s Alexa and Samsung's Bixby – to predictively deliver personalized content and experiences to us. Such advances have real implications for volunteer engagement, too.

In the past, the volunteer community has often been burned by online volunteer opportunity registries and other volunteerism-related website providers who over-promise and under-deliver. But improved electronic tools now offer growing opportunities for us to engage more volunteers and retain them. In this e-Volunteerism feature, Sam Fankuchen, the founder of Golden, a top-ranked mobile app for volunteers, shares his expertise on electronic access that impacts volunteers. Fankuchen clearly challenges us to broaden our vision when he asks: Are we ready to position our volunteer opportunity listings so that every volunteer on every device in every community can find them? 

Free, live-streaming video platforms like Facebook Live, Twitter’s Periscope, and YouTube Live allow users of smartphones or tablets to live stream something they are viewing in person so that people off-site can view and share in it, too, in real-time – events, speeches, announcements, celebrations, and more.

The keyword here is live. Viewers watch the video at the same time it’s being filmed. While videos are recorded on Facebook and available after the live event (just like on YouTube), the draw for Facebook viewers is that they can view the event as it is happening, in real time. As with other Facebook posts, they can even join in by commenting.

Could Facebook Live and other live-streaming video platforms be used to celebrate volunteers? Welcome new volunteers? Educate and train volunteers? Recruit new volunteers? “Sure!” argues Jayne Cravens, an internationally-recognized volunteer management researcher, consultant, and trainer. In this e-Volunteerism feature, Cravens outlines some captivating ideas for how to embrace live-streaming video platforms to benefit volunteer engagement, noting that you can even “plan out” your video ahead of time. “It doesn’t have to be entirely spontaneous,” writes Cravens. “It just needs to feel that way.” 

In this Voices, Kerry Martin explores the evolution and significance of TimeBanking, a concept that operates on a very core principle: For every hour of service that members provide to one another, they earn an hour that’s redeemable for another service for them.

Through stories from and about TimeBanking members, Martin reviews the nuts and bolts of this growing movement. He explains how TimeBanking has expanded to 40 countries, why individuals and organizations are included, and its growing symbolism as the “core of community.” As Martin writes, “TimeBank members open their hearts to not only help one another but also be helped by one another.”

Surveys have long raised questions about volunteer management practices. The problem with surveys, argues nonprofit management and leadership professor Mark A. Hager, is that “we can’t reliably know what’s really responsible for some trend or relationships we see in pairs of variables.”

In this quarter’s Research to Practice, Hager looks at a study involving disaster response volunteering with the American Red Cross. In this study, the authors actually ask dedicated volunteers about their satisfactions and dissatisfactions, and talk about them. Hager notes that “hearing real volunteers talk about their experiences can go a lot further in filling in some of the blanks left by survey research.”

With apologies to Sesame Street and its well-known song lyrics, “One of these things (is not like the others)” applies to the world of volunteer management, too. Consider organizational constructs like boards, councils, committees, and advisory groups. When it comes to your organization or specific project, which is most appropriate? How do you differentiate one from the next? How can volunteer administrators most effectively involve and activate members of these groups?

In this e-Volunteerism feature, academics and volunteer organizational experts Ken Culp, Harriett Edwards, and Jenny W. Jordan help answer these questions while working to clarify the many diverse angles to this topic.  

We're all trying to up our training game and learn best practices from those with demonstrated experience and excellence as trainers. Who better to learn from than e-Volunteerism’s very own Betty Stallings? The journal’s first editor of the Training Designs section, Stallings is a respected thought leader in volunteer engagement and training throughout the country and abroad.

As Stallings comes to the end of her training career, Erin Spink, the current Training Designs editor, interviewed Stallings and asked her to share not only her best training ideas but also additional tips, tricks, and recommendations to help today’s trainers grow in skills and knowledge. Stallings summarizes lessons from a lifetime of training experiences during her career as an international trainer, consultant, author, and keynote speaker who specialized in volunteerism, nonprofit fundraising, board development, and leadership. This opportunity to hear from one of the profession’s most revered trainers is not to be missed.