Engage Library
Just when you think you've seen everything in volunteerism, somebody comes along with something totally new.
And then you discover that other people are thinking about it as well.
Steve was sitting in the Washington Dulles airport over the holidays, engaging in the popular…
January 2004
The current UK government has often re-iterated that its policy is 'evidence led'. Whether this happens in practice is for others to decide, but a useful spin-off is that research has become more prevalent in areas interesting government.
This Research into Practice focuses on a…
January 2004
Betty Stallings assisted a hospital in northern California to change the future of volunteering in its institution by facilitating a process that allowed the hospital auxiliary to reach the decision to disband itself and design a new volunteer involvement program. Betty shares…
January 2004
Nursing has been an integral part of patient care forever, but it was not always considered a medical profession in its own right. For centuries nursing was done privately by family members or publicly by religious orders. Prejudice and concerns for "moral decency" barred women…
January 2004
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…
January 2004
Once in a while, a volunteer is injured, or injures someone else, in the course of his or her work. Sometimes, it is just an allegation that the volunteer injured someone else; whether or not the allegation is true, a legal defense still is required. In many cases, the cost of…
October 2003
Keyboard Roundtable participants from Australia, Canada, Rumania, the United Kingdom, and the United States discuss what an "entrepreneurial volunteer" really is (a pioneer or someone who doesn't like rules? a blessing or a nightmare?) and how a volunteer program manager can…
October 2003
Lightbulb jokes aside, one of the eternal questions which shows up on a regular basis in online discussions, training sessions and inquisitive e-mails is usually framed quite simply:"What's the recommended ratio of supervisory staff to volunteers?"Susan greets this question with…
October 2003
This Research to Practice article examines how Five Key Trends and Their Impact on the Voluntary Sector (a feature article in this issue) can be a model for interpreting data in a practical, put-it-to-use way.
The "Five Key Trends..." article is itself an example of translating…
October 2003
Earlier this year, Elisha Evans and Joe Saxton of 'NFP Synergy' in the United Kingdom, released a report titled 'Five key trends and their impact on the voluntary sector'. The report looked at five demographic trends and explored their likely impact on the voluntary sector.
The…
October 2003
This article advocates for people with mental illness being more accepted as volunteers. My experience in mental health issues is complex, encompassing several points of view. First and foremost, I am mentally ill myself, fighting against bipolar disorder type 1 since 1986. I…
October 2003
This training design offers four exercises (with a worksheet or other training tool for each) to help you, your board members, paid staff and/or frontline volunteers to become strategic thinkers who are constantly looking for new solutions, new options, and better ways of…
October 2003
You can tell the age of the book, The Citizen Volunteer , by the pronoun in its subtitle: His Responsibility, Role and Opportunity in Modern Society. The really ironic part is that the book was copyrighted in 1960 by the National Council of Jewish Women (NCJW)!
NCJW produced…
October 2003
This issue of Along the Web deals with a phenomenon that has gained much more attention in the past two years - volunteers who respond during disasters. As publicity about this surge of what has been called "spontaneous volunteering" grows, we can expect the phenomenon to…
October 2003
In response to the outbreak of Severe Acute Respiratory Syndrome (SARS) in Hong Kong, the Agency for Volunteer Service (AVS), along with Radio Television Hong Kong (RTHK), launched the “SARS Prevention Volunteer Campaign” to mobilize volunteer resources all over the community to…
July 2003
While the recent war in Iraq posed a variety of ethical, moral and humanitarian questions for many of us, it was the headline of the local daily paper that caught my attention and challenged me to confront a potential area of volunteerism with which I am not particularly…
July 2003
Laura Otten, the Executive Director of La Salle University’s Nonprofit Center, was the opening speaker at the first “National Nonprofit Human Resources Conference: Putting People at the Center,” sponsored by Action Without Borders, in Philadelphia, PA, USA, on June 12-14, 2003.…
July 2003
As Managers of Volunteer Resources, Executive Directors and other leaders of volunteer programs in nonprofit organizations, you are dealing with one constant: CHANGE. To stay current with trends in the volunteerism field, technology advances, new management systems, etc., you…
July 2003
The 1998 book by Simon Winchester, The Professor and the Madman (Harper Collins, 1998), recounts the true story of (as the subtitle proclaims) “murder, insanity, and the making of the Oxford English Dictionary.” But what does this have to do with volunteers?
July 2003
Somewhere, in an organization quite like yours, a staff member is in the countdown for the annual fundraiser... With the countdown underway, the lead staff member is juggling a thousand balls: confirming logistics for the entertainment; finalizing attendance figures with the…
July 2003