Children and Teens in Service

They packed nearly 500 boxed meals, including sandwiches and homemade cookies. And when teenagers with autism spectrum disorders got together last summer to prepare meals for needy families, they proved that volunteering is for everyone. This e-Volunteerism feature article tells the moving story of how a non-profit organization in Phoenix, Arizona, teamed up with a catering company and a homeless shelter to bring the volunteer experience to teens with autism. 

In this edition of Along the Web, we return to a topic first discussed two years ago and a trend that has grown significantly since that time: family volunteering. This update provides three categories of new and expanded materials on family volunteering, one of our favorite new approaches to traditional volunteering.

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.

One of the more interesting, and more useful, new ways of engaging people in volunteering developed in the past decade has been the concept of “family volunteering,” recruiting entire family units to volunteer together.

The implementation of family volunteering has made the greatest progress in the United States and Canada, and most of the resources listed here are from those countries, but we’re looking for both the UK and Australia to, so to speak, join the family on this one….

Steve McCurley provides his usual annotated look at Web resources in three categories for family volunteering: Sites and Programs; Research and Manuals; and Sample Forms and Materials.

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.