Engage Library

Two and a half years after the emergence of COVID-19, the world has changed in many ways. Some things about today’s life would have been completely unimaginable in December 2019. To assume that volunteering is immune from this massive wave of change would be naive at best and…

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…

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…

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…

The term “firing volunteers” can be a loaded one and create challenging ethical dilemmas for Leaders of Volunteers. Many say that their biggest challenge is dealing with “difficult volunteers” and that they are not comfortable in situations related to dismissing them. This…

In this Research to Practice, Laurie Mook looks at a new way of viewing the role of volunteer programs, that of a ‘third place.’ While our lives are often looked at as being divided between home (‘first place’) and work (‘second place’), urban sociology now proposes a ‘third…

In every aspect of volunteer management, Black Leaders of Volunteers have different professional experiences than their White colleagues. They are often a part of the communities we advocate to serve and can feel a fundamental tension between wanting to make a substantial impact…