Engage Library

For more than a century, women’s leadership has been central to shaping the voluntary and community sectors in Aotearoa, New Zealand. This Engage feature by Cheryll Martin explores that evolution—from early grassroots organising and wartime mobilisation to today’s complex,…

Due to the history of philanthropy, nonprofit and civic organizations have mostly built their engagement infrastructure around a single question: Is this person willing to serve? And that willingness to serve, author Breauna Dorelus argues, automatically generates moral…

When it comes to the user experience and digital volunteering workflows in Volunteer Engagement, what is needed and what has changed with the introduction of AI? Ahead of the Curve’s Sam Fankuchen dives into these dilemmas and more in this issue, and delivers a surprise or two.…

“Experience required” has long been a standard in volunteer recruitment, an understandable way to ensure that competent people fill key leadership roles. But when prior experience becomes the main pathway to meaningful participation, it’s worth asking how that readiness is built…

When asked if they had volunteered, only a few students raised their hands. Ten minutes later, almost all of them had their hands in the air. What if the problem isn’t that people don’t volunteer – but that they don’t recognize it? In this reflective piece, Voices Co-…

Researchers and practitioners alike have long discussed the relationship between volunteering and monetary donations, particularly with respect to the question of whether these two forms of giving are substitutes or complements of one another. Despite these discussions, those in…

“Who cares?” When it comes to volunteer impact, that’s the question Volunteer Engagement experts Rob Jackson, Erin R. Spink, Sue Carter Kahl and Jessica Pang-Parks strive to answer in this issue’s Points of View. Watch and learn from this video conversation as these four experts…

In recent years, democracy around the world has been declining. According to one report, the “global index score is at just 5.17 out of 10, its lowest point in the history of the Economist Intelligence Unit’s annual Democracy Index.” Understanding why and where democracy is…

For the past 10 years, Tobi Johnson, MA, CVA, consultant and founder of VolunteerPro, has surveyed leaders of Volunteer Engagement from around the world about a wide variety of topics, including the state of the profession and specific challenges. Johnson published her findings…

Volunteer programs are modernizing at the same time volunteerism itself is changing. Across sectors, leaders are coordinating more complex schedules, more diverse volunteer motivations and higher expectations for impact reporting, often with fewer administrative resources. It…

The only things that are constant, apparently, are taxes and ethical issues involving volunteers. Join Ethics Co-Editors Erin McLean and Erin R. Spink as they review recent news stories involving ethical challenges with volunteers and also unpack the ethics at play.

In conversations about volunteerism and community care, environmental work often gets left out of the narrative. Granted, we hear about community care and justice for volunteers in human services like food pantries, senior companionship and youth development. But what about the…

Since its charter in 1983, the Mississauga Cooksville Lions Club in Ontario, Canada had always been a high performer with significant impact in the community. However, it was not immune to the volunteer participation challenges that the COVID-19 pandemic forced on social purpose…

Paul P. Falkowski’s journey in Volunteer Engagement caught him unaware. And in this very personal Engage feature story, Falkowski describes how a one-off, musical performance in a nursing home turned into a lifelong volunteering passion that he never would have predicted,…

In this first-person Engage feature, Sharleen Tarnate-Nguyen, the Volunteer Engagement Manager for the San Diego Humane Society, gives readers an impassioned account of her journey to implement an organization-wide philosophy shift toward diversity, equity and inclusion (DEI)…

Research, as well as practical experience, points to the myriad benefits of volunteering. For some individuals, volunteering may provide an opportunity for learning, particularly among younger volunteers looking to build lasting skills to enhance professional and personal lives…

Volunteer infrastructure has always represented a certain tension between readiness and potential. To leaders in the field, structures are developed to safeguard the individuals they serve. However, volunteering infrastructure is prone to lengthy processes of onboarding and…

In this Ethics column, author and Volunteer Engagement professional Kari Astles examines the ethics of engaging staff as volunteers. This common practice raises a number of ethical considerations – namely, whether staff can or should volunteer and, if so, how and when to…

In September 2024, TAVA’s Leadership Committee made the difficult decision to shut down the unincorporated Toronto Association for Volunteer Administration (TAVA). The committee members quickly discovered that this wasn’t an isolated incident but one in a series of closures that…

In Points of View, authors Erin R. Spink and Rob Jackson look back to a 2003 Points of View column from Engage founders Steve McCurley and the late Susan J. Ellis that  posed this question: Is All Volunteering Created Equal? The authors admit that when they started…