Volunteer Work Design

Pets are therapeutic for people of all ages. But as aging pet owners and their families can attest, age and disability often restrict elderly or seriously-ill pet owners from seeking veterinarian services and general assistance for their pets. Some people even refuse to enter hospitals or residential care facilities if they are worried about their pet's future. In response, St. Joseph’s Hospital in Auburn, a suburb of Sydney, Australia, teamed up with RSPCA NSW (the Royal Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Animals, New South Wales) to establish the Pets of Older Persons or POOPs program. Through POOPs, more than 150 volunteers serve as “foster parents” to care for the pets of elderly persons and palliative care patients in the community.

This e-Volunteerism feature article showcases the POOPs program, with an inside look at how these special volunteer services for pet owners and their pets might be replicated elsewhere. 

When it comes to professional football in America, most people associate “special teams” with players who take the field for kick-offs, punt returns and kicking an extra point. But for the Miami Dolphins, an American football team based in Florida, “special teams” means so much more. The Miami Dolphins Special Teams, Driven by Chevy, is a new volunteer program that serves as one of the cornerstones of the Miami Dolphins Foundation. Although not the first volunteer initiative in professional sports, it is the first and only full-time volunteer program operated by a professional sports team. Started in 2009, the program is specifically designed to engage episodic volunteers in community service using the unique incentives and branding only available to a professional sports team.  To date, the program has attracted 3,204 volunteers who have logged 43,835 hours of community service.

In this feature story for e-Volunteerism, Leslie Nixon, the Manager of Volunteer Programs for the Miami Dolphins, takes readers behind the scenes to show a business model of volunteerism from a decidedly unique perspective. Whether you’re a football fan or not, this story will give you a new way to think about volunteer opportunities.

The volunteer base has changed over time. It has moved from volunteers with long-term commitments to welcoming the diversity of youth, families, baby boomers and employer-supported volunteers – and required us all to adapt our volunteer management practices.  In this Research to Practice, Laurie Mook presents "Bridging the Gap," a new research study out of Canada that describes the many volunteer changes of the last decade or more. Mook's review highlights some important ideas from this research study that you can put into practice today.

To be effective and to thrive in upcoming years, volunteer programs must learn to engage Millennials, that slice of population also referred to as “Generation Y” and generally born somewhere between the mid-1970s to the early 2000s. As this generation assumes its role in the workplace and begins to build families, it is essential that volunteer managers tap into the energy, technological expertise and passion for community involvement that Millennials have to offer.

This Training Design focuses on qualities of the Millennial generation, both inside and outside the workplace. The objective is to discuss motivations and work styles of this generation in order to enhance communication skills and encourage effective recruitment, supervision and retention of these volunteers. The authors – three AmeriCorps VISTA members assigned to the Minnesota Association for Volunteer Administration (MAVA) – developed and implemented the training for volunteer managers, Millennial individuals and other MAVA members interested in professional development in this area.

 

If your organization still hasn’t fully embraced the Internet to support and involve staff and volunteers, this Training Design is the key to bridging your organization’s digital divide. Jayne Cravens, who directed the Virtual Volunteering Project and helped pioneer the concept of involving volunteers via the Internet, has created a development plan that successfully introduces five crucial Internet tools, helps explain their importance to your organization, and provides tips to help your staff and volunteers finally embrace online technology. This Training Design is also a wonderful resource for those who are somewhat Internet savvy but might need a refresher course on how to use online forums, social networking sites, audio and video programs and automatic alerts. Cravens’ “Personal Online Skill Development Plan” will help shrink the digital divide for everyone.

In work-oriented societies, it can be confusing when people do something for no remuneration when that ‘something’ appears to be neither part of their livelihood nor part of their leisure. In simplest terms, the question asked by the average person in such societies is: Why work if there is no money to be made or, at the very least, nothing to be paid in kind?

In this article, Robert A. Stebbins, a noted author and college professor who specializes in the sociology of work and leisure, argues that volunteers’ activities are leisure, and that volunteers do sometimes receive money, goods or services for their efforts. Granted, these benefits can seem inconsistent with the altruistic, selfless character of volunteering that is widely held to be its very essence. The goal of this article is to examine the subtleties that revolve around being paid in money or in kind to perform a volunteer role, and to examine when this happens, what form it takes and why it occurs.