Trends and Issues

There’s a huge train leaving the station, and it’s loaded with resources that many say have the potential to fire a capacity building revolution in the nonprofit/government organization service “industry.” Let’s call it “The Pro Bono Express.” Pro bono is the latest buzzword whenever folks gather to talk about volunteerism and service in the United States. Highly skilled volunteers are not a new phenomenon, but the current twist means that for-profit corporations, especially, are seeking to offer the expertise of their employees in strategic ways that make a difference to the community.  

But what’s powering this train? What is it carrying? Can the promise be delivered? And why are some nonprofits and government organizations already on board and others concerned they’ll be left waving at the station? In this e-Volunteerism feature, author David Warshaw explores these questions and argues that finding a way to engage pro bono volunteers should be on every organization’s agenda.  

How does the depressed global economy translate into something positive for volunteering? In this e-Volunteerism feature, Marzia Baldassari, a member of the Volunteering Ireland Team and Coordinator of the Dublin City North Volunteer Centre, answers this question. With Ireland as her backdrop, Baldassari explains why volunteering and civic engagement are vital during times of shrinking financial resources and growing unemployment. Her description of Dublin City Volunteer Week, a recent celebration of volunteers and volunteering, shows why the old adage “every cloud has a silver lining” can be true for volunteering efforts during a harsh economic downturn.

In these incredibly difficult economic times, there is perhaps one silver lining: volunteer resources.  For those organizations wise enough to seize it, the economic crisis can be viewed as an opportunity to take advantage of the skills and ambitions that today’s volunteers have to offer.  This Training Design can be used to guide volunteer leaders in exploring the challenges and opportunities of volunteer management during economic distress. Participants in the training  learn six strategies to capitalize on volunteer resources during tough times. The result?  A win-win for both organizations and volunteers.

 

This issue of Research to Practice takes a look at something that isn’t a typical research report and was written almost 30 years ago. Exploring Volunteer Space: The Recruiting of a Nation was Ivan Scheier’s greatest work – an exploration both of his own mind and of the universe of volunteering.  In this report, Ivan outlines much of what volunteering can be and a great deal of what would happen in volunteering in the future. While Exploring Volunteer Space is a highly conceptual work, it has great and continuing relevance to practitioners who think about the development of their volunteer programs.

Many organizations now look specifically at the ways volunteers connect with them and how they can create new opportunities to involve volunteers of any age. This feature story explores a relatively new way to create more pathways to volunteering – “flexible volunteering.”   Flexible volunteering offers individuals a variety of different and relatively simple ways to contribute their services. Janica Fisher of Humanity In Practice (H!P) in Calgary, Alberta, Canada, explains why flexible volunteering is the secret to engaging more volunteers, and how it can be used to create meaningful ways to support an agency at the convenience of the volunteers.

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.