For Volunteers Themselves

We read a lot about volunteer engagement and leadership from the perspective of agencies who have paid Volunteer Managers – those who oversee, manage and coordinate the efforts of the volunteer team who are committed to support the work of their agency. In those conversations, it’s often easy to forget that the vast amount of volunteer leadership occurs in ‘all volunteer’-led organisations, where there is no paid staff member to take control and where the challenges can sometime be different from having a single person designated to that leadership role.

What is Engage? How can we best describe its new, exciting content – including two new columns called Ethics and Ahead of the Curve? And what happens now to e-Volunteerism.com? Can the Volunteer Engagement community continue to access content from this beloved professional journal? And how can leaders of volunteer engagement from across the world contribute to Engage?

One of the interesting things about getting older is that memories become a bit more elastic and you find yourself thinking about things that you have experienced and realize that they occurred an age or so ago.

Volunteers can make the world a better place - but it behoves us to ask the question,  "Better for whom?" In this Points of View, Rob Jackson and Erin R. Spink put this question front and center by challenging leaders of volunteer engagement to look at volunteering in real life from every conceivable angle. Jackson and Spink boldly note that “volunteering is not simply a nice thing to do: volunteers are directly shaping the world with their choices and actions.” As they write:

It would be naïve to proclaim that volunteering is always objectively good. The socially acceptable view of volunteering being for the greater good isn't wrong per se, but it has never demonstrated a true understanding of the complexities and nuances of volunteering in real life. In today's world, this overly simplistic conceptualization is actually a hindrance to understanding the power of volunteers and why our role as leaders of volunteer engagement is so critical.

With a nod to e-Volunteerism’s co-founder and volunteer management expert, the late Susan J. Ellis, Rob Jackson and Erin R. Spink use this Points of View to present a provocative and much-debated topic: What really makes someone a skilled and effective volunteer engagement professional who can train colleagues to work well with volunteers? The authors review many false assumptions about volunteer engagement in the workplace, while providing this insight: “While it’s important to recognize that everyone plays a role, it’s a fallacy to think everyone in the village brings the same skills or has the same focus. . . We forget that to our own detriment.”

In other words: It takes a village to raise a child, but not everyone can be the blacksmith. Jackson and Spink challenge readers to voice their opinions about this issue and join the debate.