Supervision

Once in a while, a volunteer is injured, or injures someone else, in the course of his or her work. Sometimes, it is just an allegation that the volunteer injured someone else; whether or not the allegation is true, a legal defense still is required. In many cases, the cost of the incident is greater than the volunteer's own ability to pay, which is why insurance protection for volunteers should be part of every nonprofit organization's risk strategy. Even so, prevention is better than cure, and there is a lot you can do to prevent accidents from happening in the first place.

In this article, we will describe the circumstances involved in the claims we see in our Volunteers Insurance Service (VIS ® ) program, and offer guidance to help you minimize the chance that such claims might happen to your own volunteers.

Injuries caused by volunteers to themselves or to others tend to fall into a few common claims scenarios which we'll cover in this article by the three types of volunteer insurance coverage that respond:

• accident medical reimbursement
• personal liability
• excess automobile liability
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  • Read more about Volunteers' Most Common Accidents - and How to Avoid Them

Every one of us has experienced at least one if not many times when we approached an organization and were treated in a less than satisfactory way. Perhaps it was the first time we arrived to volunteer and no one really knew what to do with us. How many of us have called an organization to get information only to be put on hold and transferred repeatedly, causing us to re-tell our story over and over again? Maybe it was the lack of signs outside to direct us to the right place. These experiences are “moments of truth”: moments that cumulatively create our opinion of an organization. The key to examining the moments of truth in your organization is first to recognize them and then work to eliminate the negative ones so that you create mostly positive moments of truth for your volunteers. This Training Design provides strategies for doing this.

In the training of volunteers who provide direct services to clients, it is critical that volunteers have a basic understanding of the psychosocial issues faced by those they will serve. Having this knowledge prepares volunteers for successful short-term interactions, such as delivering a meal to a frail elder, or long-term relationships, such as working with a woman with breast cancer or teaching an adult to read. An understanding of a client's emotional and spiritual issues, medical and treatment issues, legal and financial issues, and family and community issues allows volunteers to feel more confident and less anxious about encountering the difficult circumstances of their clients' lives. Perhaps most importantly, a knowledge of the life situation of another enables empathy and compassion.

This article will explore the use of the "imaginary client," a case statement which is presented early, and referred to throughout the various modules of a training, and will present a module on psychosocial issues that employs this technique. This module is currently in use at Shanti, a human service organization in San Francisco, California, which has trained more than 13,000 volunteers to provide direct services to clients during the past 27 years.

Retaining volunteers is both an indicator of and a key to success in volunteer management. When volunteers keep coming back, it is a sign that the program is being managed in a reasonable way. The return of trained and seasoned volunteers gives the volunteer program manager more time to be creative and effective in carrying out the mission.