Engage Library
For quite some time the notion of “corporate social responsibility” has been discussed and demonstrated in various ways. The concept includes many things, from producing products in environmentally-safe ways to providing family-friendly working conditions, yet our field more…
April 2005
Research-to-Practice Editor Steven Howlett re-visits a paper by Colin Rochester published in Voluntary Action, the journal of the Institute for Volunteering Research in 1999, about the management implications for volunteer coordination based on the organisational setting in…
April 2005
Introduction
Nonprofit organizations everywhere are engaging in strategic discussions to discover how they can be more efficient and effective in delivering services to enhance their missions. Too often they are not thinking about the impact of proposed changes on their…
April 2005
Over a year ago, Steve McCurley sent Susan a gift from a local library book sale. It was a copy of the 1966 novel for teens by Alice Ross Colver, Vicky Barnes, Junior Hospital Volunteer: The Story of a Candy Striper. Steve was right that Susan would like this sample of…
April 2005
Sabotage!
The very word conjures up images of old war movies – silhouetted black and white figures blowing up railway lines in the midst of the night to prevent enemy advance. Indeed, sabotage is in fact a very real tool of war. Sadly it has also been a tool of some corporations…
January 2005
Succession planning seems to be another of the ‘buzz words’ of late. I believe it is a relatively new concept to the voluntary sector, with many of us struggling to get our heads around exactly what it is. In my journey to discover what succession planning was, I found an answer…
January 2005
As we’ve often noted, the most frequently-requested topic for a workshop that any volunteer management trainer receives has always been, and continues to be, employee/volunteer relationships. The tension between paid and unpaid staff surfaces in all types of organizations and…
January 2005
With the advent of more and larger data sets, research on volunteering is transitioning from pontificating to proving hypothesis about volunteering characteristics. The RGK Center for Philanthropy and Community Service at the University of Texas publishes the Investigator, a…
January 2005
This edition of Research-to-Practice looks at three reports that examine corporate employee volunteering. Employee volunteering is an area of considerable growth and of great interest, but how can volunteer-involving organisations and volunteers managers make the most of…
January 2005
You don’t need to be a drama queen (or king), or the star of your 1971 high school production of Bye Bye Birdie, or even a Shakespearian scholar to tap into the rich tool kit of theatre techniques available to any trainer.
While a few very successful trainers go out of their way…
January 2005
Liz Adamshick shares her experience in soliciting financial donations from volunteers and her realization that volunteer administration professionals must work more collaboratively with fundraising professionals. She notes:
It took many conversations to bring us to the point…
October 2004
So much has been written about youth as volunteers, but most often by adults. Of course adults work with young volunteers, and teenagers and university students have been surveyed directly by researchers. Yet we rarely hear directly from young people in journals such as this one…
October 2004
Colleen Kelly suggests that volunteer management has taken the road more travelled – the easier road – because when we began the process of formalizing volunteer involvement we did so mainly from the point of view of organizations recruiting volunteers to “fill positions”…
October 2004
Steve and Susan react to recent news stories and observations that perpetuate some frustrating thinking about volunteers. Volunteering is either undervalued or over-valued, elevated to selfless sainthood or seen as a means to the end of teaching the middle class to love others.…
October 2004
When the 1997 National Survey for Volunteering in the UK was published, it appeared to show that young peoples’ regard and enthusiasm for volunteering was in decline. Responding to this, the Institute for Volunteering Research produced the report ‘What Young People Want from…
October 2004
Meetings, no matter what format is used, take considerable time. I hear many stories about the difficulty organizations are experiencing as they recruit volunteers for the board, a committee or a special project team because of the number of meetings required or because these…
October 2004
In 1980, VOLUNTEER: The National Center for Citizen Involvement (predecessor of the Points of Light Foundation) published Exploring Volunteer Space: The Recruiting of a Nation, by Ivan H. Scheier. As has been the case so often with Ivan’s writing, the book was way ahead of its…
October 2004
Have you ever wondered where researchers find the statistical data that allows them to determine the long-term effects of volunteering on one's health or on one's career? Or questioned how frequently the Independent Sector or the Bureau of Labor Statistics conduct surveys on…
July 2004
It seems counter-intuitive for most people working in volunteering that such participation should be bad for your health. A new research paper in the Journal of Epidemiology and Community Health claims just this, flying in the face of much other evidence. Is volunteering bad for…
July 2004
Nametags are your best friends – especially in volunteer situations where new people constantly come and go. They provide outlets for communication not unlike front porches, in that they make people less uncertain and more approachable. What’s more, with the disclosure of…
July 2004