Special Settings/Fields

This Research to Practice reviews a report on recruiting and retaining volunteers to work with AIDS service organisations. The study findings were developed through a survey of volunteers plus interviews and focus groups with managers of volunteers. The study examined  the experiences, perceptions and realities of work in this area. The researchers then tackled the challenges they found and came up with a raft of recommendations. The review of this report examines the research, its conclusions and the recommendations.

During the 1939 German Blitz, many people in Britain lost their homes and, subsequently, their ability to cook meals for themselves. The Meals on Wheels Association of America Web site further recounts:

The Women's Volunteer Service for Civil Defense responded to this emergency by preparing and delivering meals to their disadvantaged neighbors. These women also brought refreshments in canteens to servicemen during World War II. The canteens came to be known as "Meals on Wheels." Thus, the first organized nutrition program was born.

After the war, Americans adopted the home-delivered meal concept, with the first program begun in Philadelphia in 1954. Today, Meals on Wheels exists throughout the UK, USA, Canada, Australia, and elsewhere, including Japan. This “Voices from the Past” re-discovers the origins of this well-known, volunteer-intensive social service.

This article was compiled with the help of several YouthNet staff members. Special thanks to Tom Green, Fiona Battle, and Lucja Wisniewska.

YouthNet, the first “exclusively online charity,” was started in the UK to be a trusted source of information for all young people, supporting and enabling them to make educated life choices, participate in society and achieve their ambitions. Every month over 350,000 young adults regularly visit and use YouthNet’s TheSite.org, packed with useful, unbiased information and advice that 16-24 year-olds can trust. YouthNet also created and runs do-it.org.uk, the National Volunteering Database, which enables more than 100,000 people a month to find volunteering opportunities UK-wide.

So who could be in a better position to survey young people’s attitudes about volunteering and find out what volunteer recruitment approaches work and don’t with this age group? This article presents the process and findings of YouthNet’s creative, upbeat methodology, as well as the new recruitment campaign that resulted. It also shares more general data from the wider survey of volunteering in the UK.

For centuries, women relied on one another to assist in the labor and birthing process – as they still do in many countries of the world. As medicine advanced, midwives became more formally educated, but eventually doctors dominated childbirth care. First both female friends and families were pushed from the delivery room, but then invited back in. In all these stages in the evolution of childbirth, volunteers played an important role, closely connected in the last century to asserting women’s rights. This article will highlight some of the ways volunteers made a difference to the start of life, including some history of groups such as the International Childbirth Education Association and the La Leche League.

Volunteers from the Philadelphia Society for Alleviating the Misery of Public Prisons began visiting incarcerated people in 1787. Over the next 117 years, the organization continued its efforts to improve prison conditions and the treatment of prisoners. Today the same organization continues its work as the Pennsylvania Prison Society.

In 1895, Warden J.W. French, the first Warden at the United States Penitentiary at Leavenworth, realized that Federal prisoners needed an incentive to foster positive behavior. He and Chaplain F.J. Leavitt pioneered the idea of inviting people from the community to assist their institution, especially in providing literacy courses and religious services.

While much of society turns its back on convicted offenders, volunteering in prisons has always been a calling for others, both in the US and elsewhere. This article looks at how community activists, religious evangelicals, and compassionate idealists made – and still make – an impact on prison life.

The Glenbow Museum in Calgary, Alberta, Canada has a dedicated volunteer corps that until recently was comprised mainly of adults who had been serving the Museum for 20 to 30 years. Little thought had been given to succession planning, although the volunteers were clearly aging and not very diverse, yet some of these older volunteers are eager to train and teach others to take over.

The Glenbow made a conscious decision to focus recruitment efforts on youth, especially students from junior high to university. These young people have brought new enthusiasm to the volunteer program and offer hope for maintaining volunteer commitment into the future. This article examines what was learned about the special needs of young volunteers, particularly in how to communicate our recruitment appeals and how to support their efforts.

Linda Watson, Volunteer Specialist at the Hospice of Central New York, describes her involvement in bringing the concept of hospice end-of-life care to Russia and introducing Russian colleagues to the importance of including volunteers in the caregiving. Since 1985, Watson has made seven trips to the former Soviet Union, assisting in the inception of Public Hospice #1 of Velikiy Novgorod:

I spent two weeks in Velikiy Novgorod in 2003, and had the extraordinary experience of meeting with four groups of people to present my knowledge regarding volunteer roles in a hospice setting. These groups included young medical students, nurses working in the community, and a group of women retirees interested in finding meaningful volunteer work. Although the time was too short to pursue any in-depth training, I was able to outline fully the tasks that volunteers might accomplish in their settings order to assist patients and their families. Subsequent trips will allow me to follow up with more information.

Learn more about this American-Russian exchange and how western principles of hospice and volunteering are being applied in a different environment.

The Crew at Public Hospice #1

By Mikey

I am a 13-pound Shih Tzu with long silky black and white fur. I am very, very friendly and I enjoy people and like to make them happy. My pet person is married to a nationally known trainer. He and I have helped with view graphs, talks and books on how to manage volunteers, so we knew what to look for as we headed out to volunteer. I am the one writing about our experiences while sitting on my person's lap to protect both the guilty and the innocent. See what you think of the things that happened to us.

Getting Started, Sort Of

Our volunteer adventures began a few months after my pet person retired. My person and I decided that we would like to visit the elderly and sick, particularly Alzheimer's patients, so I could play with them and bring a little cheer into their day. At the same time my person decided to help out at a Science Education Center in the area. Since he is a Ph.D. scientist, he thought that his skills could be useful teaching science to children and the public. That has proven more frustrating than our experiences together, but more on that later.