Engage Library

When news first broke in March that veterans of the Iraq War had received inadequate treatment at Walter Reed Army Medical Center, few people know that a medical center volunteer would soon be credited with bringing the story to light.  In doing so, the volunteer clearly…

This edition of Along the Web focuses on a miscellaneous set of new and interesting publications on volunteering.  Included are trends in volunteering, employee volunteering, disaster volunteers, immigrant volunteers, and a miscellany of other interesting things.

Every once in a while the subject of self-development bears revisiting.  Since one of the most important roles a volunteer program manager fills is that of in-house educator – the key advocate for effective volunteer involvement – it is vital for all of us to keep our…

This “Along the Web” feature explores one of the most rapidly developing subcultures in volunteering – combining travel with service. Originally called ecotourism, it is now referred to as vacation volunteering or voluntourism -- a word which has even made its way to the…

This issue of “Along the Web” contains a variety of the newer publications now available on the Internet.  The pace of research and technical assistance material on volunteering is increasing and one can now find almost any subject covered in some detail.  What follows is just a…

Many volunteer program managers bemoan the fact that they receive little support from top management.  In this issue’s Points of View we consider the consequences of having entirely too enthusiastic backing from executive decision-makers – whether politicians or agency…

Volunteering is generally thought of as a mechanism in which people choose to assist others.  Recent work, however, has indicated that volunteering possesses a number of ancillary attributes in respect to positively affecting those who volunteer.  Volunteering, for example, has…

One of the more interesting leisure pastimes is watching the Internet colossus Google release new tools and gadgets to supplement its basic search engine.  One of these we’ve been contemplating lately is www.google.com/trends.   One of the things about search engines like Google…

“Along the Web” for this issue updates the first topic we examined back in 2000:  volunteer program liability and risk management. This is a topic that has received a lot of attention during the past five years, with a corresponding amount of materials produced to discuss it. …

We commonly do “Along the Web” by subject categories, but in the past issue I thought I’d just list a variety of interesting reports that have shown up recently that either don’t fit neatly into categories or are within subject areas that we have already covered. This continues…

Volunteering is intricately intertwined with many areas of society and public life, some obvious and some that should be better recognized. In this issue of “Points of View” we discuss public policy arenas that relate to volunteering.  For each arena, we pose some philosophic…

We have, in Points of View, spent some time in past columns looking at questions, problems, difficulties and quandaries. Alas, there are a lot of those things in our field to look at and ponder. But since that’s not the only picture, in this issue we thought we’d focus, for a…

We commonly do “Along the Web” by subject categories, but in this issue I thought I’d just list a variety of interesting reports that have shown up recently that either don’t fit neatly into categories or are within subject areas that we have already covered. We’ll continue this…

One of the more interesting, and more useful, new ways of engaging people in volunteering developed in the past decade has been the concept of “family volunteering,” recruiting entire family units to volunteer together. The implementation of family volunteering has made the…

We often think of well-functioning volunteer programs as happy little families, systems in which people get along so well that they resemble the idyllic picture of family relationships portrayed in U.S. television shows from the 1950s. And while this is often true, occasionally…

Recent years have seen a plethora of new research on volunteers and volunteerism. In this issue of “Along the Web,” we’ll focus on “volunteer management infrastructure,” and examine how well prepared we are to actually work with all those volunteers who are lurking out there.…

This issue of Along the Web looks at one of the most difficult areas of volunteering – operating a program in a rural community. Volunteer involvement is much more difficult when you are in a community where the population is sparse and widely distributed, and where many of the…

One of the results of the recent surge of research on volunteering is that it is now possible to find information about aspects of volunteering that were largely invisible twenty years ago. A prime example of this is volunteering among Gay, Lesbian, Bisexual and Transgender…

Steve and Susan react to recent news stories and observations that perpetuate some frustrating thinking about volunteers. Volunteering is either undervalued or over-valued, elevated to selfless sainthood or seen as a means to the end of teaching the middle class to love others.…

The Samaritans are a UK-based charity that provides confidential emotional support to those who are depressed or suicidal. Volunteers provide this service through 24-hour crisis-lines and e-mail response centers. One of the keystones of The Samaritans philosophy is that their…