Engage Library

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…

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…

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…

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…

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…

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?…

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…

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…

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…

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…

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…

One of the more interesting leisure pastimes is watching the Internet colossus Google release new tools and gadgets to supplement its basic search engine.  One of these we’ve been contemplating lately is www.google.com/trends.   One of the things about search…

People usually suggest an ice breaker because “we need to break up the atmosphere at the start of a meeting” or “people won’t know each other” or ”we always have an icebreaker to start off.”  Announce that you’re about to run an “ice breaker,” however, and watch the…

Dr. Ethel Percy Andrus, the first woman high school principal in the state of California, knew that retired teachers were living on incredibly small pensions, often without any health insurance. In 1947, she founded the National Retired Teachers Association (NRTA).  …

With the world’s largest sporting event, the FIFA World Cup, recently winding up in Germany, we at e-Volunteerism decided it was time to turn our attention to the nuances involved in volunteering and volunteer management practices within the context of hosting major events.…