Motivation

This report examines the civic and volunteering behavior of young adults age 15-25 following September 11th. There are surprising findings, some of which we don't quite understand, so you'll have a chance to join in the analysis as we're trying to figure out what's going on.

"There is an essential integrity in a relationship with a volunteer that I find worth examining."

Sarah Elliston proceeds to analyze the fundamental differences between relationships with employees and relationships with volunteers:

"As I examine integrity as this simplicity and deliberation in buildings and people, I recognize that some of my relationships haven't matched the characteristics. The ones where I have felt the most integrity is with volunteers. But with some employers and colleagues, I have been met with distrust and fear when I have been honest and acted from my value system. Why? I believe the major reason for the difference is the assumptions we make with volunteers and those we make with paid staff."

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• Read more about Integrity - The Guidepost to Volunteer Relationships

Soroptimist International of the Americas is an international volunteer organization for business and professional women who work to improve the lives of women and girls, in local communities and throughout the world. Bucking the trend of other large service clubs, Soroptimist is, in fact, asking its members to revamp the traditional club in order to grow its membership numbers. Find out how from excerpts of materials published in Soroptimist's Best for Women magazine and an interview with Executive Director, Leigh Wintz.

The expression “work-life balance” was first used in the UK in the late 1970s to help explain the unhealthy life choices that many people were making. According to one definition, people “were choosing to neglect other important areas of their lives such as family, friends, and hobbies in favour of work-related chores and goals.” In the 30 years since there has been research and discussion around the topic of work-life balance, taking on increased importance as the pace of life in developed countries becomes faster and faster.

As a volunteer manager, have you ever explored how volunteering fits into the balance of the lives of your team?  Many people talk about their lives as a ‘juggling act,’ in which they feel pulled in many directions by the demands of paid work, family care, community involvement, physical fitness and emotional health. Whether volunteers or employees, not all people have appropriate balance or clearly established boundaries in their lives. This Training Design is an opportunity to explore how the work-life balance of volunteers impacts your organisation.

Readers of e-Volunteerism and users of the Web site often want to find evidence to support the impact of volunteering. In short, does volunteering work? Finding evidence to support volunteering can be tricky, for all sorts of reasons. This edition of Research to Practice looks at some of those issues and reviews a publication that pulls together evidence that covers some key policy areas of volunteering.

When a volunteer walks through a manager’s door, each volunteer brings along a whole system of expectations, wishes and demands associated with the volunteer experience. Volunteer managers often recognize one category of expectations as the “fantasy world” of the volunteer. These expectations are frequently hidden from the volunteer manager and often only exist subconsciously for the volunteer.  While the volunteer’s altruistic motives are most important in the first stages of recruiting and integrating the volunteer, the volunteer’s fantasies are most likely to surface during the actual volunteer experience. During this stage, if these additional hidden needs of the volunteer are not fulfilled, the altruistic motives that the volunteer previously declared will gradually erode, often causing the volunteer to drop out early on.

In this e-Volunteerism feature story, we review how these fantasy concepts challenge volunteer managers and discuss why it’s important to understand the nature of volunteer fantasies. Ultimately, volunteer managers who learn to manage these conditions help influence the management practices of the entire organization – for the better.

In this discussion of research from the Netherlands, Research to Practice explores how volunteers are as committed as paid workers and provides examples of how organizations can deepen the attachment of their volunteers.  Editor Steven Howlett further explores how the issues discussed in this research “chime nicely with what we know, underlining other findings and suggesting that for commitment, at least, volunteers from different parts of the globe have a lot in common.”