Volunteer Centers and Infrastructure

Victoria is a fascinating city nestled in the westernmost portion of British Columbia. It is a city which is known for being “more English than the English” and a great place to have afternoon tea in the old style.

You wouldn’t think they’d be producing material on the cutting edge of volunteer involvement, but this is the second research project I’ve seen from them in the past ten years that takes a very interesting and in-depth look at some area in volunteer management -- in this case, using volunteering as a way to connect isolated individuals back with society.

In the late 1990s, the Volunteer Center of Battle Creek (Michigan) worked closely with the Points of Light Foundation (POLF) and the W. K. Kellogg Foundation (WKKF) to adopt and implement the POLF Family Matters program. The goal of the POLF Family Matters program was to “make family volunteering the norm in the U.S.” In support of this goal a goal that we share with the POLF we knew that implementation of a single program, no matter how well intended or implemented, would not be sufficient to move us to a community where family volunteerism was a norm. To reach this goal, we needed to develop the capacity of our own organization and the capacity of the organizations we serve, to work with a new kind of volunteerism family volunteerism.

This article reports on some of the strategic decisions we made to develop our capacity and that of participating organizations to work with family volunteers. A focal point of this article and our own learning was a study of family volunteers that explored the barriers and incentives to family volunteerism.

The growth of volunteering around the world has also led to the growth of organizations whose purpose is to support volunteering. What follows is a list of such organizations. It is vaguely organized by geographic territory - sometimes by country or sub-territory, sometimes by continent. We have omitted descriptions because they would be so repetitive; in most cases the names of the organization will give you at least some idea of their primary focus.

Many of these sites are, naturally enough, not in English. You might find it interesting to try some of the translation sites available via the Web. You can find a guide to sites which translate from and into various languages at www.babelfish.com.