Special Settings/Fields

Along the Web has previously highlighted volunteering in health care, human services, and in very emotionally challenging settings or situations. But in this new article, the focus turns for the first time to volunteering in hospice care, with a special look at how and why volunteers provide end-of-life and palliative support to adults and children, their families, and friends. Through links to hospice websites, resources, videos, and relevant research about volunteers and hospice care, author Arnie Wickens shows volunteers being well integrated alongside highly-trained professionals, either on-site or in hospice at home and community programmes.

An increasing number of hospitals and other healthcare environments are now beginning to incorporate integrative health interventions into their settings to meet the stress or symptom management needs of both patients and employees. These practices often include massage, canine visits, art, music, energy healing, guided imagery, essential oils, yoga, and Tai Chi, and work in tandem with mainstream medicine to address everything from patient boredom to emotional distress, physical symptoms of pain, anxiety, and nausea.

While interest in integrative health interventions in hospitals has grown over the last several years, the use of volunteers in these programs has grown, too. And as integrative care expert Cathrine Weaver writes in this issue of e-Volunteerism, there has also been an uptick in the unanticipated need for emotional support and more focused monitoring of volunteers in these programs. “The integrative interventions volunteer role makes great demands on the individual, and these demands can take an emotional toll,” writes Weaver. “Understanding this has helped us see the importance of supporting these volunteers in a different way.”

In this feature story, Weaver explores how to engage volunteers in integrative health programs and how to provide the monitoring behaviors and support they need to maintain their own wellbeing while helping others.

With more and more volunteer recruitment done online, it is important to take a step back and look at who has or doesn’t have the opportunity to volunteer as a result of not having household Internet access. Has digital access changed the demographics of who is being asked to volunteer or to serve in leadership positions such as on a board? In this issue’s Research to Practice, Laurie Mook reviews a study on the influence of household Internet access on formal and informal volunteering. The results confirm that “volunteer recruitment may not always be an inclusive process” and that nonprofits have a role in bridging this digital divide.

A core goal of all leaders of volunteers is to ensure that volunteers have a great experience. If you are directly managing the volunteers yourself, that goal can be structured and achievable. But in larger organisations, where the responsibility for managing and supporting volunteers is delegated to specific departments, ensuring a consistent volunteer experience can be more difficult. One way to address this is to provide training to non-volunteer engagement colleagues who are supervising volunteers.  

This Training Designs provides practical training exercises to equip non-volunteer staff with the knowledge and skills needed to help create great volunteer experiences. Developed by the head of volunteering development at The Myton Hospices, Warwick, Warwickshire, these exercises have been used successfully to help staff gain a better understanding of volunteering, provide clarity around staff roles and responsibilities for supervising volunteers, and give ideas to manage volunteers well. The exercises are designed to be fun, generate discussion, share best practices, and be memorable. These exercises have worked for many leaders of volunteers - and they can work for you, too.

The devastating impacts of hurricanes and floodwaters are well known throughout the world, including nearly every region of the United States. In September 2013, a catastrophic amount of flooding besieged Boulder, Colorado, when almost a year’s amount of rain fell in just a few days, killing eight people, stranding thousands, damaging nearly 19,000 homes, and creating miles of impassable roads. 

Despite these conditions, volunteers began showing up. In addition to local residents offering to help, thousands arrived from far-off states to help shelter evacuees, clean out flooded homes and buildings, and dig out debris that littered fields and roads for miles. Boulder quickly recognized that in order to rebuild a resilient city, it would need to leverage all of its resources wisely – including the talents of residents and others who wished to volunteer.

In this e-Volunteerism feature interview, Beth Steinhorn, president of VQ Volunteer Strategies, begins with a first-person account of the city's initial response to the floods. She then conducts an important interview with Aimee Kane, Boulder's Volunteer Program and Project Manager, who discusses why and how the City of Boulder built a culture of community and volunteer engagement in the years since the floodwaters of 2013. 

Being outdoors is, for many people, one of the great pleasures in life. Whether out in wide open spaces, walking in hills and mountains, or navigating the crashing waves at the seashore, contact with the natural environment is good for us. Except, that is, for when it isn’t, when the curse of bad luck or poor judgement means that something goes dreadfully wrong.

When things get out of hand and we need assistance, emergency services like volunteer firefighters and ambulance crews are typically there for us. But in many communities, rescue service volunteers are the first responders, especially in rural or coastal areas where they have the highest levels of training and skills needed to rescue people in peril. These volunteers put themselves forward to save the lives of those who face extreme conditions, regardless of the usually dangerous, life-threatening situations they face.  

In this Along the Web, writer Arnie Wickens writes about emergency services volunteers who are experienced specialists in the art of outdoor rescues. Whether climbing up mountains, diving into lakes and oceans, or venturing into underground caves, these volunteers are true lifesavers when something outdoors goes wrong. 

Surveys have long raised questions about volunteer management practices. The problem with surveys, argues nonprofit management and leadership professor Mark A. Hager, is that “we can’t reliably know what’s really responsible for some trend or relationships we see in pairs of variables.”

In this quarter’s Research to Practice, Hager looks at a study involving disaster response volunteering with the American Red Cross. In this study, the authors actually ask dedicated volunteers about their satisfactions and dissatisfactions, and talk about them. Hager notes that “hearing real volunteers talk about their experiences can go a lot further in filling in some of the blanks left by survey research.”

It all began when people with intellectual disability told us they wanted their own friends: friends who were not part of their own family or paid to spend time with them. At IHC we listened, and that premise became the foundation that IHC Volunteer Friendship Programme is based on: One person with intellectual disability is matched with one volunteer, and both decide together what they want to do out in their communities. — Sue Kobar

IHC is New Zealand’s largest provider of services to people with intellectual disabilities and their families. Its one-to-one, Volunteer Friendship Programme has been very successful. As author Sue Kobar explains in this feature story, IHC’s desire to attract younger volunteers has now expanded the concept of what the friends do together to include opportunities for much shorter, focused, and task-specific volunteering. While maintaining the same one-to-one premise, IHC implemented skill-based volunteering to support a person with intellectual disability as he or she sets out to learn a new skill (like using public transportation, for instance) or to achieve a personal goal (say, attend a Zumba class). 

As Kobar explains, these shorter-term assignments are a win-win for all involved. Such opportunities, which allow volunteers to set the time commitment to fit the project, have attracted younger volunteers to IHC who may very well be on the road to long-term volunteering. And along the way, the people supported by IHC learn new life skills.