Engage Library

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…

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…

For centuries, women relied on one another to assist in the labor and birthing process – as they still do in many countries of the world. As medicine advanced, midwives became more formally educated, but eventually doctors dominated childbirth care. First both female friends and…

A never-before published draft excerpt from Carol Weisman’s upcoming book, Raising Charitable Children: Kids Who Give as Good as They Get (anticipated for publication in late 2005). The chapter previewed here explains the concept – and how-to’s – of a “Joy and Sadness Meeting”…

The Glenbow Museum in Calgary, Alberta, Canada has a dedicated volunteer corps that until recently was comprised mainly of adults who had been serving the Museum for 20 to 30 years. Little thought had been given to succession planning, although the volunteers were clearly aging…

Most of us have seen board members separate their collective, decision-making role on the board from their individual, working role in other volunteer capacities. And we know that board members who fail to make or remember the distinction can be very problematic. The level of…

Hong Kong has a long history of developing volunteer services. People from all walks of life are familiar with the concept of volunteerism while a wide variety of specific volunteer opportunities have been opening up, ranging from management roles to the execution of specific…

The UK think tank Civitas just announced a new publication with the intriguing title of Conspicuous Compassion: Why Sometimes It Really Is Cruel to Be Kind, by Patrick West. According to reviewers, West feels that people who wear colored ribbons to show empathy with worthy…

Is Volunteering Rewarding in Itself? Stephan Meier and Alois Stutzer Institute for Empirical Research in Economics, University of Zurich February 2004 Some things said about volunteering seem intuitively right; such as, volunteering can make you happy. Research such as the…

Brenda Clifton of the Volunteer Center of the Pikes Peak Region offer this fun group exercise to enliven volunteer recruitment training. Participants are given one-half of a pair of job titles and have to find their matching half. The catch is that group 2 has traditional,…

Volunteers from the Philadelphia Society for Alleviating the Misery of Public Prisons began visiting incarcerated people in 1787. Over the next 117 years, the organization continued its efforts to improve prison conditions and the treatment of prisoners. Today the same…

The May 2003 Hot Topic (http://energizeinc.com/hot/2003/03may.html) on the Energize Web site discussed how volunteers are portrayed in television and film in North America - and site visitors added more examples. This Keyboard Roundtable invites colleagues in Germany, Singapore…

Through several years of working in public relations (PR) and journalism, I've heard many publicity officers of social and sporting clubs and PR officers of non-profit organisations complain they are not getting 'enough exposure': 'I sent a release to The Times last week, and…

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…

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…

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…

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…

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…

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…

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…