Login | Subscribe | Stay Engaged | About | Partnerships | Contact
Volunteer Work Design
A New Era for Corporate Volunteerism
It’s hard to talk about corporate volunteerism without imagining painful stereotypes: standalone projects, third-party organizing services, hosting 200 employees for an ad hoc event, one-time events for skilled professionals, staged photo ops, reporting via the company’s digital CSR tool, hunting for grant dollars, other mutually performative behaviors, and so on and so forth.
Designing Volunteer Roles: The Ethics of Paid and Unpaid Work
In March of 2020, much of the in-person and organization-based formal volunteering came to a halt in Europe and North America. While informal volunteering and spontaneous people-helping movements forged on, the organizations where many of us contribute our professional skills made drastic changes to volunteering and made them very fast. Organizations were forced to come up with solutions to provide or not provide services that were needed but had not previously been designated as paid positions.
Does Household Internet Access Make a Difference in Inclusive Volunteer Recruitment?
With more and more volunteer recruitment done online, it is important to take a step back and look at who has or doesn’t have the opportunity to volunteer as a result of not having household Internet access. Has digital access changed the demographics of who is being asked to volunteer or to serve in leadership positions such as on a board? In this issue’s Research to Practice, Laurie Mook reviews a study on the influence of household Internet access on formal and informal volunteering. The results confirm that “volunteer recruitment may not always be an inclusive process” and that nonprofits have a role in bridging this digital divide.