Engage Library

When it comes to describing volunteers and the volunteer community, attention tends to be focused on social or human services.  In fact, case studies, examples of volunteering, and vocabulary choices disproportionately assume that the volunteers are "solving problems" or "…

Should there be a significant difference in leadership ability between the head of the organization and the head of the volunteer program?  While there may be differences in authority, leadership is not restricted to the executive director or chair of the board, nor should it…

Leaders are people who inspire others to follow.  They do this largely through their communication.  That influence partly comes from what leaders talk about, such as a vision of the future, organizational values, and other topics which have been well-described in many books…

While most attention was fixed on the human beings caught in the devastation of Hurricane Katrina, there were many who immediately realized the plight of animals – especially family pets – who were truly in a life-or-death situation at the same time.  The Humane Society of the…

Every once in a while the subject of self-development bears revisiting.  Since one of the most important roles a volunteer program manager fills is that of in-house educator – the key advocate for effective volunteer involvement – it is vital for all of us to keep our…

2005 in the UK was the Year of the Volunteer, with a programme of events designed to increase the profile of volunteering. To build on its legacy, the England Volunteering Development Council, a high-level representative mechanism of volunteering, established The Commission for…

How do you avoid having to sell a solution or future direction that the management or leadership team has created? Because it IS a sell job when a few people decide on a new way for the many.  When there are circumstances where any answer is a potential right answer – and there…

A few years ago, we reprinted an excerpt from a long out-of-print book written by Ivan H. Scheier in 1980 called Exploring Volunteer Space.  We noted then that this volume contained ideas far ahead of its time – which is exactly what we’d come to expect from Ivan, one of the…

All faiths rely heavily on the goodwill of their followers to undertake work on behalf of the church/synagogue/mosque/congregation of both a spiritual and practical nature. Is this recognized as “volunteering” by those in leadership positions within their respective faiths?  How…

This “Along the Web” feature explores one of the most rapidly developing subcultures in volunteering – combining travel with service. Originally called ecotourism, it is now referred to as vacation volunteering or voluntourism -- a word which has even made its way to the…

This issue of “Along the Web” contains a variety of the newer publications now available on the Internet.  The pace of research and technical assistance material on volunteering is increasing and one can now find almost any subject covered in some detail.  What follows is just a…

The potential for partnership exists for every organization. Partnerships can be formed within the nonprofit sector as well as with for-profits and government. We can share space, equipment, staff and volunteers, training, experience, events, revenue – the list is endless. It is…

Many volunteer program managers bemoan the fact that they receive little support from top management.  In this issue’s Points of View we consider the consequences of having entirely too enthusiastic backing from executive decision-makers – whether politicians or agency…

One area in which volunteering is important is in helping people who are new, or relatively new, to a country settle and integrate. This is the focus of A Part of Society. The report rightly starts from a position that, although (in the UK at least) we know a great deal about…

There are over 10,000 registered volunteers in the emergency management field in the province of British Columbia (BC) in Canada, working in Emergency Social Services, Search and Rescue, and Amateur Radio Communications.  During the summer of 2003, with many fires burning in the…

This is a landmark article, in that it tackles a critical subject rarely presented in depth:  what it takes to raise money to support volunteers and the infrastructure of a volunteer program.  As the title says, noted trainer and author Betty Stallings covers both the attitudes…

A “linear community” stretching over two thousand miles up and down the eastern United States, the Appalachian Trail was first conceived in the 1920s and completed in 1951.  From first to last, it was a project of volunteer initiative and ingenuity – and continues today to be a…

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…

The nonprofit sector has long been the domain of organizations and individuals interested in philanthropic activities and charitable work.  However, this is changing, as Corporate America discovers that nonprofits and employee-volunteering programs can be legitimate and useful…

What/who do you call senior leaders where you are?  Perhaps you use director, CEO, executive director, director of volunteers, board president and, for me, add bishops, archbishops, chairs of provincial or national committees, doctors (the great senior leaders in most voluntary…