Engage Library
Once again, Along the Web summarizes a variety of new materials and events on the Web that are related to volunteering. This popular feature by Steve McCurley presents a sampling of research studies and articles on trends, environmental volunteering, volunteers by age groups,…
October 2008
With this issue of e-Volunteerism, co-founders and co-publishing editors Susan J. Ellis and Steve McCurley begin their tenth year of publication. When they began this effort, both admit that they had no idea whether a venture like e-Volunteerism would succeed at all, much less…
October 2009
This issue of Along the Web continues our practice of providing you with links to a variety of the more interesting studies and reports available via the Internet. In this issue we’ll look at everything from international youth service programs to volunteering in cathedrals to…
October 2009
“What kinds of work should volunteers do?” Volunteer program managers tend to run into this discussion in a number of different ways, often centering on the issue of whether volunteers can do some positions/work or whether only paid staff can do the work. And the usual context…
April 2010
In this issue’s Along the Web, Steve McCurley presents another collection of Miscellaneous Good Stuff. In this regular e-Volunteerism column, McCurley covers a wide range of topics, ranging from trends in Internet usage and volunteering by seniors to issues related to student…
April 2010
Most of our readers manage volunteer programs in social, community, arts or environmental services – which leads us to easily overlook the fact that some of the largest and most complex volunteer efforts lie entirely outside these areas. In this Along the Web, we look at one of…
January 2010
For the last decade, we’ve watched professional associations of volunteer program managers – on local, state/provincial, national and even international levels - launch, thrive, wither, revive or stagnate in dozens of countries. Our conclusion? There is still no consistency of…
January 2010
One of the fastest growing and most significant new ways of volunteering in the past 20 years has been volunteering through one’s workplace. Major corporations have created extensive programs to encourage and enable their employees to volunteer and this form of business social…
July 2009
Over the years we’ve seen an impressive array of attempts to “re-conceptualize” volunteering, at least to re-name it. Last fall, the United States saw a flurry of special events, legislative proposals and media attention focused on the subject of “service.” It was brought to a…
July 2009
The Internet now offers a fascinating array of tools and techniques for managing volunteers – VolunteerMatch, Facebook, blogs, Vlogs, Wikis, Twitter and many others. In this Along the Web, we take a look at these and other cutting-edge tools. After a quick research review on…
April 2009
This issue of Research to Practice takes a look at something that isn’t a typical research report and was written almost 30 years ago. Exploring Volunteer Space: The Recruiting of a Nation was Ivan Scheier’s greatest work – an exploration both of his own mind and of the universe…
January 2009
In his later years, Ivan Scheier finally learned how to use e-mail (at least in a sparing fashion) and to dabble in other parts of Web communication. He was definitely not a techie and probably not even comfortable with being a Web person, but you’ll still see his traces online…
January 2009
e-Volunteerism tends to be a pretty straightforward management journal. Despite the people-centered perspective that is at the heart of volunteerism, we don’t normally publish human interest soft stuff. So why would we devote an entire issue to one person? In this Points of…
January 2009
This edition of Along the Web is a compilation of some of the more interesting material on volunteer involvement that we have encountered during the first half of 2008. Among the listing are items on background screening of volunteers, LGB T (lesbian, gay, bisexual,…
July 2008
In this issue, Points of View tackles an often elusive topic that nonetheless seems always challenging to volunteer managers: how to expand an organization’s leadership and find the right volunteers for the job. In “Trolling for Leadership,” we look at using real recruitment…
April 2008
While we often focus on the good that volunteering does for recipients of service, there is increasing evidence that volunteering benetifts volunteers, too. One of these benefits, for instance, is increased work skills and experience that may lead to better prospects for…
April 2008
This edition of Along the Web looks at online periodicals that focus on volunteerism – including magazines, newsletters, blogs, mailing lists and more. We organize the periodicals into specific categories, and give a summary of many that we feel are particularly useful and…
January 2008
This edition of Along the Web continues to explore some of the newer and more interesting topics on volunteerism available via the Web. We cover a very wide range of research projects and manuals from a variety of countries, reflecting the high level of interest now focused on…
October 2007
In this Points of View, the authors won’t argue for a return to the old and casual systems for volunteer involvement. After all, this is a different world with different problems – with criminal record checks serving as a perfect example of something that volunteer managers…
July 2007
In this edition of Along the Web, we return to a topic first discussed two years ago and a trend that has grown significantly since that time: family volunteering. This update provides three categories of new and expanded materials on family volunteering, one of our favorite…
July 2007