Trends and Issues

Over the last 10 years, a number of formerly thriving national Volunteer Centres in English-speaking countries have faltered, forced to find avenues of new funding or to merge with other organisations. But what about the fates of local and regional Volunteer Centres? How have they fared?

Using the development of volunteering infrastructure in Australia as a starting point, writer Annette Maher considers the pressures on Volunteer Centres everywhere – national, regional, and local. She considers their struggles to meet the needs of volunteers and their organizations, and to advocate for the field of volunteering in a world that is rapidly changing. In this feature story, Maher also examines such universal issues as the formalization of volunteering, professionalization of volunteer management, the benefits and dangers of government funding, and the need to collaborate. 

This much is clear: Volunteer Centres are vital to build and sustain local and regional volunteer ecosystems. Often seen as the “one-stop” help for individuals looking to get involved in the community, Volunteer Centres are not only remarkable at surviving funding and policy changes but they have also inspired the development of volunteering innovations like service-learning, community service, family volunteering, and corporate volunteering. 

But this much is clear, too: Volunteer Centres throughout the world can no longer operate as they have always done. Volunteer Centres have to be responsive to the changing times they helped bring about or they will lose their ability to create a volunteering legacy for the future. Inspired leadership and creative vision are absolutely critical elements for Volunteer Centers to move forward, with experts predicting that a high-tech, high-energy, Apple Store-style social action centre may help redefine the Volunteer Centre of the future. 

From Canada to the Netherlands to Australia, from the United States to the United Kingdom, six experts on Volunteer Centres join together in this critical and provocative Keyboard Roundtable to discuss the issues facing Volunteer Centres around the globe. These issues, the experts discovered, are quite often the same regardless of geography. 

The National Trust, a British charity founded by volunteers in 1895 to advocate historic preservation and conservation, announced in 2010 its determination to make sweeping changes, both to expand public engagement at its properties and to restructure its internal staffing and procedures.

These changes included a mandate to think differently about volunteering:

To move away from volunteering being seen as a sacrifice (“I give up my time to volunteer”) into volunteering as an active choice to use one’s leisure time in meaningful and rewarding ways.  Volunteering shouldn’t be about giving up something; it should be about having everything to gain.

Part 1 of a two-part series, this feature article presents why and how the Trust decided to rethink its approach to its nearly 67,000 volunteers in a campaign called “Going Local.”  This article includes a reprint of one of the early products of this Going Local campaign, a booklet called Thinking Differently about Volunteering. In a few short pages, the booklet outlines the importance of volunteers and presents a game plan for moving forward with volunteer engagement at the National Trust. The results of this campaign, and the National Trust’s continued efforts “toward our shared goal of engaging every household and connecting with local communities,” will be presented in Part 2 of this series in a future issue of e-Volunteerism.

Most organizations have a strategic plan, a fund development plan, a marketing plan and an IT plan. Why is it that so few have a volunteerism plan? Recognized as the oldest voluntary health organization in the United States, the American Lung Association began a three-year planning process for volunteer involvement only six years ago. The Association recently took a different approach to the process, resulting in a volunteerism plan that has ownership from many stakeholders, simultaneously building both the culture of volunteerism and the capacity to sustain it.

In this feature story, authors Mary Ella Douglas, Melissa Gilmore, Katherine H. Campbell and Marybeth K. Saunders explain how they created the Association’s latest strategic volunteerism plan. They first reached out to colleagues in other organizations to ask if they would be willing to share their strategies with them and learn from each other; surprisingly, they did not receive even one plan from their search. Instead, what they heard time and again was, “What a great idea!” and “We don’t have one, but we’d love to see yours when it’s finished.” Using a process that included representation from all levels of its structure as well as external volunteers, the American Lung Association proceeded to create a revised volunteerism plan in about nine months. This story documents the authors’ experience, one that produced principles and a process that can be applied to most organizations as they embark on developing a strategic volunteerism plan of their own.

Assessing learning needs, performing a skills audit and carrying out a knowledge inventory are important activities when providing effective training within organisations. How thoroughly should we extend such techniques to volunteers? How might we link an individual volunteer skills analysis with the overall aims and needs of the organisation?

In this Training Designs article, Sue Jones explores the benefits of needs analysis for volunteers. She examines the pros and cons of a range of assessment methods, and provides practical tips to adapt and apply to volunteer management. 

Australia has seen its share of natural disasters – most notably bushfires and floods – and the surge of spontaneous volunteering each emergency produces. While recent attempts to register volunteers in advance of a disaster are useful, too few are actually activated during an emergency because local officials do not have the resources or skills to coordinate them. In the spring of 2012, with the annual bushfire season right around the corner, Volunteering Victoria, the peak volunteering body for the State of Victoria in Australia, had a simple idea: Why not create a platform that links volunteer program managers across the state in times of emergency?

Launched in January 2013, the Volunteer Program Manager Register now has 70 skilled and experienced volunteer program managers ready to respond to calls for assistance in times of emergency and natural disaster in Victoria, Australia. In this feature article, author Alicia Patterson, the marketing and communications manager for Volunteering Victoria, explains how this Register is meant to work, and how it helps the helpers coordinate volunteers who are keen to assist with recovery efforts when disaster strikes.