Community Organizing

Homeless Connect is an initiative of the Brisbane City Council (Australia) to put over 300 homeless persons in contact with various service providers from housing, medical and legal organizations. This comprehensive one-day effort, staged in City Hall, also links service providers within the homeless sector. Volunteering Queensland has twice recruited and trained over 200 volunteers to provide one-to-one support to the homeless participants, clearly an enormous undertaking that ensured the success of Homeless Connect in 2006 and 2007.  This article explains how Volunteering Queensland accomplished this task.

Māori volunteerism, which has become embedded within the fabric of Māori communities, is a culture that derived from voluntary activity, introduced by immigrants in the early colonial settlements of Aotearoa/New Zealand.  Current literature, however, fails to provide sufficient evidence to pinpoint when this culture emerged; instead, literature discusses the contemporary culture of voluntary activity and attaches Māori terms to explain the behaviour.  This article provides an important new look at the origin to Māori volunteerism by identifying certain documentations in history where volunteerism was exercised by Māori.  It gives a voice to an activity that has been unrepresented, and recognises volunteers during 1800 to 1900 for their communal activity and contribution to building the society of Aotearoa/New Zealand.

How do you avoid having to sell a solution or future direction that the management or leadership team has created? Because it IS a sell job when a few people decide on a new way for the many.  When there are circumstances where any answer is a potential right answer – and there is a large group of stakeholders invested in that answer – there is another way:  large group interventions (LGI).  Instead of training people on a new direction and having to parry objections and dissatisfactions, including them in the creation process avoids the uphill battle.

There are several designs for large group participative events:  Search Conferences, Future Search Conferences, Open Space Technology, Real Time Strategic Change, World Café, and the Technology of Participation, to name some of the most popular.   There are some basic principles behind all of these techniques that are discussed in this article, along with specific design ideas when using the search conference method.

Although South Africa has a long history of volunteering, employee volunteer programmes are a relatively new trend. Charities Aid Foundation Southern Africa (CAFSA) has been actively encouraging and facilitating employee giving for a number of years. They have recently embarked on a new campaign designed to raise the awareness of employee volunteering and to increase the number of companies offering employee volunteering programmes to their staff.

This article describes the context and tradition of South African volunteering in general and employee volunteering in particular. Then there is a detailed account of the first-ever Employee Volunteer Week run by CAFSA in early 2005, with a thoughtful discussion of the effort’s successes, challenges, and plans for 2006. Also included are a PDF of the how-to toolkit developed for employers and nonprofits, several photographs, and a brief video clip of the public service announcement filmed for promotion.

Linda Watson, Volunteer Specialist at the Hospice of Central New York, describes her involvement in bringing the concept of hospice end-of-life care to Russia and introducing Russian colleagues to the importance of including volunteers in the caregiving. Since 1985, Watson has made seven trips to the former Soviet Union, assisting in the inception of Public Hospice #1 of Velikiy Novgorod:

I spent two weeks in Velikiy Novgorod in 2003, and had the extraordinary experience of meeting with four groups of people to present my knowledge regarding volunteer roles in a hospice setting. These groups included young medical students, nurses working in the community, and a group of women retirees interested in finding meaningful volunteer work. Although the time was too short to pursue any in-depth training, I was able to outline fully the tasks that volunteers might accomplish in their settings order to assist patients and their families. Subsequent trips will allow me to follow up with more information.

Learn more about this American-Russian exchange and how western principles of hospice and volunteering are being applied in a different environment.

The Crew at Public Hospice #1

Ten Thousand Villages, the largest fair trade organization in North America, works to provide vital, fair income to artisans in Africa, Asia and Latin America by marketing their handicrafts and telling their stories. The nonprofit organization has its American headquarters in Akron, Pennsylvania and Canadian headquarters in New Hamburg, Ontario, and relies on a network of volunteers to keep operating costs low and to share its story with consumers. Tens of thousands of artisans benefit from the dedication and involvement of hundreds of volunteers across North America. Whether volunteers pull and pack orders in the warehouse or unpack merchandise and assist customers in a store, they know that their involvement changes artisans’ lives.

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.