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Motivation
Radical Welcome as a Guide for Community Engagement
From the outside, the large agency looks like a model nonprofit when it comes to involving volunteers. It hosts a significant volunteer and paid staff team. There are volunteer applications, legal waivers and comprehensive training. The team is guided by operational plans based on lessons learned from the corporate world and nonprofit consultants. The leadership heeds and hones best practices for volunteer management; it collects and makes decisions using many, many data points. It has come a long way from its humble all-volunteer roots.
The Role of Volunteers in Co-Producing ‘Whole-of-Society’ Solutions
Article reviewed: Mamuji, A., Kenny, C., & Ahmed, S. (2021). Co-production Through Volunteerism in Emergency Management: Drawing Lessons from Canada’s Syrian Refugee Resettlement Initiative. Canadian Journal of Emergency Management 1 (1), 40-65. Available at: https://cdnjem.ca/wp-content/uploads/2020/12/CJEM-v1n1-Mamuji-Kenny-Ahmed.-Co-production-through-volunteerism.pdf
Research on Volunteerism: What Still Needs to be Done?
Thirty-five years ago, Susan J. Ellis published an article in the Journal of Voluntary Action (now Nonprofit and Voluntary Sector Quarterly) entitled “Research on volunteerism: What needs to be done.” Ellis mused – in 1985 – that the only subject at that time that seemed to attract the attention of researchers was 'motivation,' addressing the question of "why would these people work for free?!"
Fast forward to the 21st century. In this issue, Laurie Mook reviews a comprehensive study of research on the management of volunteer resources that examines the relationship between HR practices and performance. We then invite you to contribute your ideas for future research. What research questions should we be asking on this topic in today's context?
Financial Disbursements to Volunteers: Reimbursements, Payments, and Non-Cash Benefits
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A Note About Terminology
For the purpose of this project and this article, we use the term ‘disbursement’ as a general term referring to any type of financial value provided to volunteers by an organization in the course of their volunteer service, including reimbursement, payment, or non-cash benefits, defined as follows:
Bring Out the Extraordinary Through Continuous Improvement
What’s one way to increase the effectiveness of an organization that wants to involve volunteers in meaningful ways? In this e-Volunteerism feature, volunteer management experts Melanie Merrill and Ruth Leonard of Macmillan Cancer Support, London, write that in order to ensure continuous improvement of the volunteer experience, those who manage volunteers need to be well prepared, supported, and developed.
In this article, Merrill and Leonard explain how they equip volunteer managers through their Volunteering Quality Standards program, a unique framework developed to help raise standards in volunteer management and improve the volunteering experience of Macmillan’s 25,000 volunteers. The writers briefly describe these standards, and illustrate how “ensuring the voice of the volunteers” involves strategy development innovation on the part of volunteer managers. They conclude that “empowering volunteer managers through developing their skills ensures exemplary and impactful volunteer experiences” for those who give their time, energy, and experience to Macmillan. In other words, it’s how Macmillan brings out the extraordinary in everyone involved.