Engage Library

As advocates for volunteers, we are generally in the position of convincing administrators and frontline paid staff to be more creative in designing work for volunteers – to involve them more.

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.…

Think about the communications methods you – and others at your organization – use with volunteers right now. Is your organization getting the information it needs about volunteers and their activities via these methods? Information such as: Their accomplishments as volunteers…

In March 2005, a pioneering 48-hour event was held in Canberra, Australia: The 1st Annual Retreat for Advanced Volunteer Management . The 50 participants came from all of the Australian states and territories, plus representatives from New Zealand, Singapore, and the US. The…

For quite some time the notion of “corporate social responsibility” has been discussed and demonstrated in various ways. The concept includes many things, from producing products in environmentally-safe ways to providing family-friendly working conditions, yet our field more…

Research-to-Practice Editor Steven Howlett re-visits a paper by Colin Rochester published in Voluntary Action, the journal of the Institute for Volunteering Research in 1999, about the management implications for volunteer coordination based on the organisational setting in…

Introduction Nonprofit organizations everywhere are engaging in strategic discussions to discover how they can be more efficient and effective in delivering services to enhance their missions. Too often they are not thinking about the impact of proposed changes on their…

Over a year ago, Steve McCurley sent Susan a gift from a local library book sale. It was a copy of the 1966 novel for teens by Alice Ross Colver, Vicky Barnes, Junior Hospital Volunteer: The Story of a Candy Striper. Steve was right that Susan would like this sample of…