History - Organizations

On June 6, 1939, youngsters who loved to hit a ball and run some bases played the first Little League baseball game at Park Point in Williamsport, Pennsylvania. Today, what began as a three-team organization has grown into Little League^® International (LLI) – spreading across the United States and into 100 countries, involving nearly 1.5 million adult volunteers committed to helping young Little League players develop athletic skills alongside concepts of character and loyalty.

Despite its world-famous work and engagement of volunteers, there has been little exchange between LLI and the volunteer management field. In this Voices, Lori Renner Larsson sets out to fill this void with her review of Little League volunteers, answering questions about their structure and how they are coordinated while sharing insights about the lasting appeal of volunteering around children and baseball.

Founded in 1901, the Junior League rapidly became the most influential women’s organization in the United States. Today there are also chapters in Canada, Mexico, and the United Kingdom. Its mission statement puts volunteering and women front and center:

The Association of Junior Leagues International Inc. (AJLI) is an organization of women committed to promoting voluntarism, developing the potential of women, and improving communities through the effective action and leadership of trained volunteers. Its purpose is exclusively educational and charitable.

Local Junior Leagues made many significant contributions to their communities, but also developed an elitist public image of wealth, social standing, and exclusion. The list of famous women who were members of the League is very long. When the feminist movement affected every women’s organization, the Junior League found itself challenged to retain its position while changing with the times.

This Voices from the Past story explores the history of the Junior League and how it evolved in the face of modern life, still keeping its mission rooted in the power of volunteers.

The National Foundation for Infantile Paralysis (later known as the March of Dimes) was founded by Franklin Roosevelt in 1938 and immediately engaged thousands of volunteers in a two-decade struggle against the dreaded disease of polio. And it was successful, ultimately having to face the question: What happens to the energy and devotion of volunteers when their job has been accomplished?

In his 1957 book, The Volunteers, Columbia University researcher David L. Sills examined the phenomenon of the March of Dimes, particularly its devoted corps of volunteers, and raised issues still pertinent today.

Founded in 1904, the American Lung Association is the nation’s oldest voluntary health agency. Our work throughout our first century has been innovative – ours was the first disease-specific organization to couple the skills and expertise of the medical professional with the dedication and commitment of the lay volunteer, which is now the model most other voluntary health agencies follow. Volunteers were integral to the founding of our organization almost 100 years ago and still play a significant role in our efforts to prevent lung disease and promote lung health nationwide. With 1,300 staff and 130,000 volunteers working to achieve our mission in our 200 Lung Association offices, you can imagine the enormous challenges we face to stay connected and offer the essential learning needed to help those with lung disease.

As Director, Volunteer Management and Learning and a member of our organization’s Learning Center, the use of technology and e-learning techniques is an essential part of my efforts to enable idea sharing and learning opportunities no matter where our staff and volunteers may be located. The following article outlines some of the methods that we are employing.

The Volunteer Probation Officer Law of 1950 formalized Japan’s unique and long-standing reliance on volunteers to assist professional probation officers and aid offenders of all ages with rehabilitation and to work on crime prevention. Today, just under 50,000 people from nearly every area of Japanese society serve as volunteer probation officers (VPOs), alongside less than 800 paid probation officers working with approximately 60,000 people on probation or parole. Half of all VPOs have been involved for more than 10 years and their average age is 62 – a development that is causing some concern.

In this Voices from the Past, we learn the history of VPO activity and why the Japanese believe that social and community support for offenders' rehabilitation are necessary as part of effective crime prevention. Granted, they have been extremely successful; according to a Stanford University study, “Fewer than 4 percent of Japanese criminals who have been assigned to a volunteer officer will commit another crime within a year of their release on parole or probation.”  In addition, we explore what other countries have learned from this Japanese model of volunteer involvement, and briefly review the issues affecting the future of VPOs in Japan. 

Most people know about credit unions but consider them simply as alternate banking systems. In fact, credit unions are volunteer-run cooperative credit agencies that combine idealism and practicality. In this Voices from the Past, we learn about this rarely discussed corner of the volunteer world. We explore the origins of credit unions in Europe and Canada in the 19th century and trace their evolution into the institutions that operate today and handle a significant part of installment credit in the United States and elsewhere. We review why credit unions speak of themselves as a “movement” and why credit unions openly use the vocabulary of members and volunteers.

The Association of Volunteer Bureaus (AVB) celebrated its 25th anniversary in Kansas City, MO., in 1976, coinciding with the American Bicentennial.  A gala celebration on the theme, “Volunteers:  Our Finest Natural Resource,” brought together the leaders of what are now called “volunteer centers” across the United States. In this Voices from the Past, we excerpt from the Proceedings book that AVB published, and see what has changed or stayed the same from 1951 to 1976.

International youth exchange programs have been around for as long as most of us can remember, arranging for teenagers to spend time in a foreign country living with volunteer “host families.”  Over 50 countries are engaged in this sort of exchange, through dozens of organizations.

In this Voices from the Past, we’ll examine the unusual histories of two such programs:  AFS (formerly American Field Service) and Youth for Understanding (YFU).  AFS evolved from its origins as a volunteer ambulance corps during World War I. YFU began as an effort to hear the wounds of World War II by bringing teenagers from war-torn Germany to the United States to live with a family and attend high school for a year. Read how these organizations grew to expand their missions and international reach.

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.