Children and Teens in Service

In a recent report, The National Youth Agency in England explores the skills, knowledge and attitudinal development that young people derive from volunteering. The research did not intend to evaluate volunteering projects in terms of quality or volunteer management. Rather, the study focused on how youth benefited from volunteering, and what mattered most to them during the volunteer process. The researchers explored this issue in depth through 30 case studies and interviews with 215 young people. This Research to Practice reviews the key themes of this report, suggests how organizations can use the findings to promote the message of volunteering to the young, and discusses how the results can benefit and enhance the volunteering experiences for volunteers of all ages.

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.

This article was compiled with the help of several YouthNet staff members. Special thanks to Tom Green, Fiona Battle, and Lucja Wisniewska.

YouthNet, the first “exclusively online charity,” was started in the UK to be a trusted source of information for all young people, supporting and enabling them to make educated life choices, participate in society and achieve their ambitions. Every month over 350,000 young adults regularly visit and use YouthNet’s TheSite.org, packed with useful, unbiased information and advice that 16-24 year-olds can trust. YouthNet also created and runs do-it.org.uk, the National Volunteering Database, which enables more than 100,000 people a month to find volunteering opportunities UK-wide.

So who could be in a better position to survey young people’s attitudes about volunteering and find out what volunteer recruitment approaches work and don’t with this age group? This article presents the process and findings of YouthNet’s creative, upbeat methodology, as well as the new recruitment campaign that resulted. It also shares more general data from the wider survey of volunteering in the UK.

A never-before published draft excerpt from Carol Weisman’s upcoming book, Raising Charitable Children: Kids Who Give as Good as They Get (anticipated for publication in late 2005). The chapter previewed here explains the concept – and how-to’s – of a “Joy and Sadness Meeting” as a technique of helping parents and children discover the possible causes on which to focus their charitable attention. The written material is accompanied by an audio interview with Carol, as she shares three real-life examples of how to encourage family philanthropy.

The Glenbow Museum in Calgary, Alberta, Canada has a dedicated volunteer corps that until recently was comprised mainly of adults who had been serving the Museum for 20 to 30 years. Little thought had been given to succession planning, although the volunteers were clearly aging and not very diverse, yet some of these older volunteers are eager to train and teach others to take over.

The Glenbow made a conscious decision to focus recruitment efforts on youth, especially students from junior high to university. These young people have brought new enthusiasm to the volunteer program and offer hope for maintaining volunteer commitment into the future. This article examines what was learned about the special needs of young volunteers, particularly in how to communicate our recruitment appeals and how to support their efforts.

In the late 1990s, the Volunteer Center of Battle Creek (Michigan) worked closely with the Points of Light Foundation (POLF) and the W. K. Kellogg Foundation (WKKF) to adopt and implement the POLF Family Matters program. The goal of the POLF Family Matters program was to “make family volunteering the norm in the U.S.” In support of this goal a goal that we share with the POLF we knew that implementation of a single program, no matter how well intended or implemented, would not be sufficient to move us to a community where family volunteerism was a norm. To reach this goal, we needed to develop the capacity of our own organization and the capacity of the organizations we serve, to work with a new kind of volunteerism family volunteerism.

This article reports on some of the strategic decisions we made to develop our capacity and that of participating organizations to work with family volunteers. A focal point of this article and our own learning was a study of family volunteers that explored the barriers and incentives to family volunteerism.

An international Youth Forum was held just prior to the IAVE World Volunteer Conference in January 2001 in Amsterdam. By all accounts this was an extraordinary experience for the participants. Representatives of the Youth Forum were invited to report back to the full conference at one of the plenary sessions. They charged onto the stage with enthusiasm, sharing the theme of their meetings: "Volunteering IS sexy!" These young people urged everyone to change the old-fashioned images of volunteering.

Conferees were given a handout with eight graphics designed by the young people during a team exercise at their Forum. Each gives a different interpretation of "SEXY" as an acronym. e-Volunteerism is pleased to reproduce these with permission from the Amsterdam conference committee, representing the International Association for Volunteer Effort.