Engage Library
Those who doubt the value volunteers provide are the Yin to the Yang we share in our dedication to the practice of Volunteer Management. They say, “How do you support the idea that community service has an economic value? Your evidence is fluff!” We say, “Human capital is a…
January 2024
The Australian volunteering landscape has experienced a fundamental shift. The declining rate of formal volunteering, COVID-19 pandemic and soaring cost of living have created a perfect storm. People are less available and less able to volunteer, despite an exponential increase…
October 2023
Tim Suda is an experienced Volunteer Engagement professional, and has worked in emergency response Volunteer Leadership with the American Red Cross. However, on January 12, 2023, his life turned upside down when he was caught up in a tornado and became a recipient of the kind of…
October 2023
"We do it because we are supposed to.""We get the most volunteers this day, but they never come back.""I get anxious about navigating this day." "It's clear the legacy doesn't matter anymore." These are real sentiments about MLK Day of Service and the feelings provoked by…
October 2023
Few topics have been surrounded in contemporary tech lore as much as “The Blockchain.” At the same time, it’s something of a sleeper phenomenon. An author by the pseudonym Satoshi Nakamoto published a paper in 2008 that many cite as the blueprint for blockchain technology and…
October 2023
The title of this article suggests that there are two types of people or even jobs – generalists and specialists. In looking at most professions, we see a mix of the two. Yet when we look at Volunteer Engagement, we would argue that we only see generalists. While there may be…
October 2023
“Who explores, implements, accesses, maintains and improves technology in our organization, and under what circumstances?” If you haven’t already asked this question, it's time to do so. Maybe you have an Information Technology (IT) practice, or maybe no one’s job description…
July 2023
Part Two of a Four-Part SeriesIn the first installment of this series, Engage introduced concepts surrounding Care Circles and how they are formed and managed. A Care Circle is an informally-created, often-spontaneous group of people who come together in support of a person,…
July 2023
Engage author Sam Fankuchen previously reviewed the use of an Artificial Intelligence (AI) tool called ChatGBT in the field of Volunteer Engagement. Now, in this new Ahead of the Curve, Fankuchen taps his considerable AI expertise to provide additional information about the…
April 2023
How do we volunteer – and involve volunteers in our programs – without falling into the saviourism trap, a concept that rears its ugly head when volunteers feel that we can come in and “fix” the problems of a group or community that we don’t belong to? In this highly personal,…
April 2023
Part One of a Four-Part SeriesA chance encounter with volunteering legend Susan J. Ellis–in a New York City hotel lobby during the 1997 Points of Light conference–sets the stage for the start of this three-part series on “Digital Care Circles: The Future in Volunteering?”In…
January 2023
Q4 of 2022 was a seminal moment for artificial intelligence. Indeed, this was the quarter when the conversation about AI shifted from hypothetical questions and defined capabilities to a mass-market, free and commercial product offering. This is when we met ChatGPT.
ChatGPT is…
January 2023
The volunteering sector has been through a challenging period in the past few years, and student volunteering in the UK has been no different. Volunteering services at Higher Education Institutions (HEIs) dealt with a specific set of challenges during the COVID-19 pandemic,…
January 2023
For the past five years, the Minnesota Alliance for Volunteer Advancement (MAVA) has conducted research and education on race equity in volunteerism. Through funding from the Minneapolis Foundation, MAVA was able to convene the necessary voices – over 40 community members and…
October 2022
There is a long tradition in Volunteer Engagement of focusing on the things we want, the things we feel we don’t have. Whether it’s more power, resources or respect, we give an inordinate amount of our time, dialogue and effort as a profession to the things we perceive we lack.…
October 2022
In Voices, Thu-Trang Tran, the CEO of Volunteer West, takes a step back from the dynamics of volatility, uncertainty, complexity and ambiguity (VUCA) that is reverberating today throughout the volunteering sector. Through her helicopter view of volunteering as a part of the…
October 2022
Every volunteer is a special snowflake – and that's a good thing! Individual perspectives help us find more human solutions to outstanding needs, and knowing the unique powers of each volunteer would ideally enable us to be the best versions of our programs.
In the past, we…
October 2022
Is there a new energy emerging in volunteering? And if so, why are these things happening now? Points of View authors Rob Jackson and Erin R. Spink charge right into these questions with a nod to an array of initiatives from England, Scotland and Australia that all point to a…
July 2022
In recent years, 70 percent of employees said they need to work at a company that offers giving and volunteering opportunities, yet only 10 percent of employees who worked at such companies participated in these programs. And in 2020, as we all know, a pandemic struck and the…
July 2022
While Points of View argues that a new energy is emerging in volunteering, the picture isn’t so clear to Holly Daniels of MAVA (Minnesota Alliance for Volunteer Advancement). In this Engage feature, Daniels taps into her daily connections with Volunteer Engagement Leaders to…
July 2022