Disabilities, Volunteers with

Volunteers are the backbone of our communities, a fact that we all appreciate every day on the job while coordinating and managing volunteer programs. This article is about one volunteer manager’s successful experience helping a valued community member with special needs connect with a volunteer role that would suit her. Author Kayla Young explains that she decided to share her experience to provide encouragement to all leaders of volunteers who work with people who may need a bit of extra initial training and support. “With our busy schedules, a common reaction to special needs may be, ‘I’m sorry but I don’t have time for that,’” writes Young. “But as you’ll see from this story, a tiny investment in standing up for the potential of others can often yield big results for your organization.”

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 employment. This is of particular interest for those working with disadvantaged populations for whom the act of volunteering may prove crucial to social mobility and inclusion. In this issue of Along the Web, we’ll look at a variety of resources and guides that discuss the connections between volunteering and employability.

They packed nearly 500 boxed meals, including sandwiches and homemade cookies. And when teenagers with autism spectrum disorders got together last summer to prepare meals for needy families, they proved that volunteering is for everyone. This e-Volunteerism feature article tells the moving story of how a non-profit organization in Phoenix, Arizona, teamed up with a catering company and a homeless shelter to bring the volunteer experience to teens with autism. 

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 been shown to contribute to the overall physical and psychological health of those who volunteer.  In this Along the Web we’ll examine another positive aspect of volunteering – its ability to assist those who have been excluded from the social, economic and political mainstream. And we’ll focus on resources for assisting those of you who wish to broaden and diversify your volunteer base.

This is a somewhat eclectic and arbitrary selection and we’ve chosen to simply group the results into rough categories, many of which overlap:  persons with mental illness; persons with disabilities; immigrants, refugees and asylum seekers; low-income and unemployed people; minorities and ethnic communities; homeless persons;  Aboriginal and Native communities.

One of the truly neat things about volunteering is that is allows people to make a contribution to the world in which they live. With formal volunteering this is only true, of course, to the extent that organizations allow people to volunteer, thus recognizing that ability to contribute. This issue’s Along the Web focuses on recognizing the ability to contribute of volunteers with disabilities, a group which has not always enjoyed full access to volunteer opportunities, but which is now receiving much fuller attention. We’ll look at handbooks, manuals and articles as well as organizations that are attempting to facilitate increased involvement.