Engage Library

There was a time when the word “intern” was used mainly for doctors-in-training. Over the last 50 years, however, the concept has widened to include many different experiences in nonprofit, government and for-profit settings. Some internships are formal requirements through…

Money – or lack of it – always rears its ugly head in discussions of professional development for those in volunteer management, even though successful leaders of volunteers are creative when it comes to finding resources for volunteers. In this Points of View essay, Susan J.…

The Minnesota Association for Volunteer Administration (MAVA) hosted its biennial conference on May 8 - 10 in Minneapolis. MAVA is one of the premier professional societies in North America and its conference is always excellent. Participants come from Minnesota and way beyond,…

What is the definition of “giving?” Has the term become synonymous with nothing but money – rather than the giving of an individual’s time, talents and skills?  And what about the word “philanthropy?” Has it, too, become indistinguishable from the giving of only money? Are…

In the previous issue, we asked e-Volunteerism readers to help us in “Keeping the Plural in Points of View,” and a number of you did just that.  We received a range of thoughtful and provocative opinions about the major challenges facing leaders of volunteers in their everyday…

Points of View is moving into new territory. For the past 12 years, I have written this quarterly essay with Steve McCurley, who recently retired. But I have no desire to change the title of this feature to “Point” of View. The plural "Points" has always mattered. So we will do…

In this Voices, we underscore the fact that Steve McCurley has been remarkably prolific during his career. His earliest publications (1972- 2004) are listed in a 10-page, single-spaced bibliography on the Energize Web site. As the Director of Research for the National Center for…

e-Volunteerism is now 12 years old, and their joint amazement about that fact caused Steve McCurley and Susan J. Ellis to look back and review what they’ve done. They write this Points of View in a somewhat anecdotal and disorderly fashion, since there are a lot of different…

To kick off a new year and a new issue, Points of View authors Susan J. Ellis and Steve McCurley sink their editorial talons into the lack of quality academic research on volunteering, lashing out at researchers who approach volunteering as a mystery and routinely neglect to…

Want to elicit an “ah-ha!” moment from people who think too narrowly about what volunteering is and who does it?  The “Personal Volunteer History” worksheet provided in this Training Designs article is the core of a training exercise that will do just that. It will help:…

Between them, Steve McCurley and Susan J. Ellis have about 70 years of experience in teaching volunteer management, providing training for far more than 500,000 managers of volunteer programs. In this Points of View, these well-known trainers and authors nonetheless acknowledge…

In April 1973, the Saturday Review published a special business supplement, “Can the Businessman Meet Our Social Needs?” In this series of essays, noted business authority Peter F. Drucker and then New York City deputy mayor Edward K. Hamilton debated the pros and cons of this…

The next time you have a few volunteer program managers together, here’s an interesting exercise question:  “How many of you have volunteers working side-by-side with you to do what’s needed for successful volunteer engagement – beyond helping with clerical work?”  When we ask…

In March 2011, 10News in San Diego, California, ran a story with the following headline: “Habitat For Humanity Charging Local Volunteers: Group Forcing Local Volunteers To Pay Before Helping Build Homes.” The resulting controversy revealed both facts and opinions about “passing…

The European Commission has declared 2011 to be the European Year of Volunteering (EYV), which coincides with the United Nations’ International Year of Volunteers + 10. Both organizations have created a variety of “working groups” to study and report on issues that are…

An Invitation to Our Readers to Help Us Design, Create and Staff a Feature that Will Integrate All-Volunteer Organization Views

The National Foundation for Infantile Paralysis (later known as the March of Dimes) was founded by Franklin Roosevelt in 1938 and immediately engaged thousands of volunteers in a two-decade struggle against the dreaded disease of polio. And it was successful, ultimately having…

At some point in any meeting of volunteer managers there emerges a recurring theme:“They” don’t respect us! It is raised in tones ranging from angry shouts to bemoaned cries, and is often followed by a litany of examples of neglect, misunderstanding and abuse. To whom the “they…

In 1978, when Katie Noyes Campbell and I wrote the first edition of By the People: A History of Americans as Volunteers, we included a chapter on the emergence of the profession of volunteer management.

In their last Points of View, Steve and Susan offered a somewhat tongue-in-cheek reaction to the current fad that suggests volunteer involvement would improve if we simply turned everything over to corporate human resources “professionals.” But in this follow-up column, the…