Exploring Volunteer Space: The Recruiting of a Nation
This issue of Research to Practice takes a look at something that isn’t a typical research report and was written almost 30 years ago. Exploring Volunteer Space: The Recruiting of a Nation was Ivan Scheier’s greatest work – an exploration both of his own mind and of the universe of volunteering. In this report, Ivan outlines much of what volunteering can be and a great deal of what would happen in volunteering in the future. While Exploring Volunteer Space is a highly conceptual work, it has great and continuing relevance to practitioners who think about the development of their volunteer programs.
Children Are Our Future
Those of us involved with volunteerism for a long time have always thought that the easiest way to ensure its future is to teach volunteering to children at a very early age. In fact, research shows that those who volunteer as children are much more likely to continue to volunteer as adults. In this Points of View, Steve McCurley and Susan Ellis, long-time proponents of involving children as volunteers, review methods (some good, some questionable) that organizations and individuals now use to encourage volunteer participation by children. They discuss the biggest barrier to volunteering by children – the reluctance of agencies to accept them. And then they turn the tables and ask the readers for their own points of view on this topic. Is volunteering a valuable experience to provide to young children? What do children gain from volunteering? What is the youngest age for children to volunteer? This interactive Points of View is designed to engage readers and get at the heart of this very important volunteer topic.
Flexible Volunteering: One Size Fits All
Many organizations now look specifically at the ways volunteers connect with them and how they can create new opportunities to involve volunteers of any age. This feature story explores a relatively new way to create more pathways to volunteering – “flexible volunteering.” Flexible volunteering offers individuals a variety of different and relatively simple ways to contribute their services. Janica Fisher of Humanity In Practice (H!P) in Calgary, Alberta, Canada, explains why flexible volunteering is the secret to engaging more volunteers, and how it can be used to create meaningful ways to support an agency at the convenience of the volunteers.
The Changing Environment of Volunteers in Health Care - Part 2
Over the last few years, we have seen employer-supported volunteering grow into a vital element of the volunteerism field around the world. More recently, we’ve begun to see a shift from the so-called “team challenge” approach to volunteering (where teams of employees perform a task, such as painting a community centre) to volunteering that makes use of an individual employee’s professional skills (providing professional Human Resources support, for example). On top of this, anecdotal evidence seems to indicate that the growth and popularity of employer-supported volunteering is not diminishing despite the global financial crisis.
In Part 2 of this Keyboard Roundtable, we bring together leading employer-supported volunteering practitioners and thinkers to explore these and other key issues. And, as we always do at e-Volunteerism, we give you a chance to share your thoughts and experiences on this important new trend in the volunteer field.
Clearing Hurdles on the Volunteer Obstacle Course
In this Points of View, the authors won’t argue for a return to the old and casual systems for volunteer involvement. After all, this is a different world with different problems – with criminal record checks serving as a perfect example of something that volunteer managers learned the hard way need to be done, as imperfect as they currently function. But a goal of volunteer resource managers should still be to extend a welcome to prospective volunteers, making the process go as well as it can in today’s more complex environment. This Points of View presents some ideas that will help more people clear the hurdles of the volunteer process and help them actually cross the finish line as accepted volunteers.
The Growth of VolunTourism
A significant area of growth in recent years has been the phenomenon of 'voluntourism' – traveling somewhere on vacation but using the time to engage in some type of organized volunteer project. In this Keyboard Roundtable, we seek to find answers as to why this form of volunteering has become so popular, what it takes from volunteer management to coordinate this effort and the potential for even further growth in the future.
Challenges to Volunteerism in the 80s
In June 1979, Pennsylvania’s “First Annual Symposium on Volunteerism and Education” was convened in Harrisburg. The keynote address was delivered by Gordon Manser, co-author of the 1976 book, Voluntarism at the Crossroads. We dust off and republish his speech here, allowing us to look back through the prism of 31 years at the issues he predicted would affect our field in the coming decades. Some – such as the impact of the gasoline shortage at that time or Proposition 13 in California – have evolved into somewhat different challenges. Other themes continue to be very pertinent today.
On the Same Wave: The Story Behind Australia’s First Squad of Muslim Surf Lifesavers
In December 2005, an assault on three volunteer surf lifesavers led to violence and what are now known as 'the Cronulla riots.' In the aftermath of these events, a number of parties (including the Australian Government, Sutherland Shire Council, Surf Life Saving Australia, Surf Life Saving NSW, and various other groups) representing Muslims proposed a program which would attempt to bring harmony back to the Cronulla beaches. Ultimately, this program has seen almost 20 young people of mainly Lebanese Muslim background undergo the arduous training to become volunteer surf lifesavers. But is this mere tokenism or a genuine attempt by those involved to make a difference?
Miscellaneous Good Stuff, Part 4
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.