Family Volunteering

Are you helping to develop the next generation of volunteers? Today’s youth are tomorrow’s adult volunteers—if they grow up with the empathy and mindset to contribute their time and talents to their communities. Unfortunately, some studies have shown that contemporary youth are actually less likely to volunteer, even though community engagement appears to be more important to them than it was to their parents a quarter-century ago.

This Along the Web column examines the importance of involving children and teens in the volunteer experience and explores ways to introduce children and teens to volunteering. Because reaching children also means reaching their parents, this column identifies frequently suggested approaches to family-oriented volunteering for different age groups. By examining what appeals to parents, organizations may be able to find new ways to reach families, involve youth, and help encourage the volunteers of tomorrow.

"A person's a person, no matter how small." Dr. Seuss

This quote from American writer and cartoonist Theodor Seuss Geisel embodies the theme of this edition of Along the Web: children as volunteers. While not a new idea, the thought of incorporating the efforts of young children into volunteer programming may seem daunting for some. Increasing the use of this underutilized group of talented “small” people is the goal of this Along the Web and its selected websites, which include: examples of volunteer activities for children; best practices for working with young volunteers; and special issues to consider. Tips and guidanc

e for volunteer administrators are also be provided. In keeping with the words of Dr. Seuss, let’s remember that a volunteer’s a volunteer, no matter how small.

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.

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.

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.

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.