Healthcare

How can texting a friend raise significant funds to help patients and families who are battling brain tumors? The answer is simple for Judy Zocchi and Olivia Questore, the two driving forces behind “Text for 10,” a unique fundraising event to benefit Monmouth Medical Center’s Davis S. Zocchi Brain Tumor Center in Long Beach, New Jersey.

In 2007, Zocchi had just learned to text. Questore, like all teens and tweens today, could nimbly text like the best of them. And both shared the experience of losing a loved one to a brain tumor. So Zocchi, the CEO of a multi-media company, and Questore, then a middle school student, created an innovative fundraiser – one that has been repeated every year since.

e-Volunteerism Senior Editor Margaret O. Kirk interviews both Zocchi and Questore for this story, which presents their creative, replicable idea and probes the volunteer management challenges that both faced in this inter-generational, modern media effort.

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.

Over the last few years, we have seen employer-supported volunteering grow into a vital element of the volunteerism field around the world. More recently, we’ve begun to see a shift from the so-called “team challenge” approach to volunteering (where teams of employees perform a task, such as painting a community centre)  to volunteering that makes use of an individual employee’s professional skills (providing professional Human Resources support, for example). On top of this, anecdotal evidence seems to indicate that the growth and popularity of employer-supported volunteering is not diminishing despite the global financial crisis.  

In Part 2 of this Keyboard Roundtable, we bring together leading employer-supported volunteering practitioners and thinkers to explore these and other key issues.  And, as we always do at e-Volunteerism, we give you a chance to share your thoughts and experiences on this important new trend in the volunteer field.

This Research to Practice reviews a report on recruiting and retaining volunteers to work with AIDS service organisations. The study findings were developed through a survey of volunteers plus interviews and focus groups with managers of volunteers. The study examined  the experiences, perceptions and realities of work in this area. The researchers then tackled the challenges they found and came up with a raft of recommendations. The review of this report examines the research, its conclusions and the recommendations.

During the 1939 German Blitz, many people in Britain lost their homes and, subsequently, their ability to cook meals for themselves. The Meals on Wheels Association of America Web site further recounts:

The Women's Volunteer Service for Civil Defense responded to this emergency by preparing and delivering meals to their disadvantaged neighbors. These women also brought refreshments in canteens to servicemen during World War II. The canteens came to be known as "Meals on Wheels." Thus, the first organized nutrition program was born.

After the war, Americans adopted the home-delivered meal concept, with the first program begun in Philadelphia in 1954. Today, Meals on Wheels exists throughout the UK, USA, Canada, Australia, and elsewhere, including Japan. This “Voices from the Past” re-discovers the origins of this well-known, volunteer-intensive social service.

For centuries, women relied on one another to assist in the labor and birthing process – as they still do in many countries of the world. As medicine advanced, midwives became more formally educated, but eventually doctors dominated childbirth care. First both female friends and families were pushed from the delivery room, but then invited back in. In all these stages in the evolution of childbirth, volunteers played an important role, closely connected in the last century to asserting women’s rights. This article will highlight some of the ways volunteers made a difference to the start of life, including some history of groups such as the International Childbirth Education Association and the La Leche League.

Linda Watson, Volunteer Specialist at the Hospice of Central New York, describes her involvement in bringing the concept of hospice end-of-life care to Russia and introducing Russian colleagues to the importance of including volunteers in the caregiving. Since 1985, Watson has made seven trips to the former Soviet Union, assisting in the inception of Public Hospice #1 of Velikiy Novgorod:

I spent two weeks in Velikiy Novgorod in 2003, and had the extraordinary experience of meeting with four groups of people to present my knowledge regarding volunteer roles in a hospice setting. These groups included young medical students, nurses working in the community, and a group of women retirees interested in finding meaningful volunteer work. Although the time was too short to pursue any in-depth training, I was able to outline fully the tasks that volunteers might accomplish in their settings order to assist patients and their families. Subsequent trips will allow me to follow up with more information.

Learn more about this American-Russian exchange and how western principles of hospice and volunteering are being applied in a different environment.

The founding of the American Lung Association is intertwined with the work of many courageous volunteers who began by fighting the dreaded scourge of tuberculosis at the end of the 19th century. Read the stories of Dr. Edward Livingston Trudeau, the first volunteer president of the National Association for the Study and Prevention of Tuberculosis (and himself a victim of the disease), Emily Bissell who created the amazingly-successful Christmas Seal campaign, and other pioneering volunteers.