Linda Graff, Nancy Macduff and I presented a workshop at the 2004 International Conference for Volunteer Administration in October about trends and issues that impact the management of volunteers. Linda talked about what has not changed in the last 25 years: the things we are still talking about and complaining about, such as a lack of day time volunteers when we all know that as long ago as 1980 Nora Silver wrote about the need for organizations to shift their thinking, volunteer assignments, etc. to accommodate working volunteers. Yet here we are almost 25 years later and I had someone in a workshop recently tell me their number one problem was an inability to recruit enough daytime volunteers. Sigh!
In our workshop I chose to talk about what has changed and Nancy talked about what needs to change based on overall changes in society, volunteers, etc. I though I would share some of my thought about what has changed in our field.
First, I believe the volunteers and the managers of volunteers have changed. The majority of today's volunteers are working people looking for short term, project or episodic based volunteer opportunities. Students are also looking for the short-term assignments that fit comfortably with school schedules and requirements. Because we are more educated as a society, we have better educated volunteers who have been in the workplace and have higher expectation about how the work is organized, managed and scheduled. A couple of recent studies report that managers of volunteers are also more highly educated. In a study by Macduff (2004) of 500 organizations, about 70 % of managers reported having college degrees, including Masters Degrees and Ph.D.'s. This is a shift from 30 years ago when many managers of volunteers slipped into the position because they were active volunteers for the organization. There is considerable turnover in the field and it sometimes seems few people are looking at this as an ongoing profession.
We know that volunteers today tend to volunteer for much more individualized reasons than in previous generations. My father was a very active volunteer in our community. He entered his volunteer work through his association with the Downtown Kiwanis Club. This was the club to join if you were a young businessman. This was where you made contacts and were able to network with the top people of many local businesses. As a requirement of membership, it was expected that he would become involved in the local Kiwanis projects. Over the years he became very involved with local issues for the blind, as this was the focus of the Kiwanis club. While he served as my role model, I did not become involved as he did. In fact, I became involved in volunteer work in typical Boomer fashion: through a protest! A group of neighborhood mothers were very unhappy about the condition of our local playground and we decided to take our concerns to the Director of Parks and Recreation. We did a little mini-march on City Hall. Not long after that I was contacted by the local recreation center and invited to join their advisory council to assist with the renovation of the playground. That was first entrance into a lifetime of volunteer service. My children are active in volunteer work, but they are more specific than I was. They don't tend to work on community issues, but they do work on very individualized projects. Increasingly I hear of volunteers who contact an organization saying they have two hours next Thursday from 4-6 p.m. and then stipulate exactly what they would like to do. If the organization cannot accommodate their schedule and interests, they politely move to the next organization.
Sound familiar? I may be stretching it a bit, but I am not far from today's reality. Volunteer are motivated in very different ways. Are they more self-centered? No, I think they are simply more focused and better able to articulate exactly what they are interested in doing. And, they know it has to fit with a busy lifestyle.
Next, I think globalization is changing our work. The volunteer community has expanded to include our global neighbors. Students in Denver Colorado work on a service project with children in Africa. Listserves allow us to share information with people around the world. The World Volunteer Web, sponsored by the United Nations Volunteers (UNV) shares research models, and information about the rapid growth of volunteerism as a means for building civil society and addressing social and economic goals. While the United States, and Canada to some extent, remain focused on a service provision model for volunteer service, other countries are engaging volunteers to support community development work, advocacy and citizenship. While we may be exporting models for organizing and managing volunteers, there is also a great opportunity for us to import new ideas and new models of engagement. One of the best family volunteer programs I have ever seen is run by the Hong Kong Volunteer Bureau.
Changing volunteers and globalization have helped to create new forms of volunteerism. We have moved from talking about episodic volunteers to talking about spontaneous volunteers. Though we have long had disaster relief volunteers, we now have crisis response volunteers. This year's political campaigns have highlighted the impact of technology as a tool to engage and organize people. A recent study of Volunteer Match reported that 1.5 million individuals used the Internet to access the services of Volunteer Match. The UNV coordinates the Online Volunteer Program that connects volunteers with assignments anywhere in the world. To explore the impact of online volunteers, read about the experiences of ten volunteers recognized for their online work in 2004. http://www.onlinevolunteering.org/stories/ov_oftheyear.php
We now talk about corporate social responsibility, civic engagement, church based organizing, advocacy and social capital as forms and styles of volunteerism. Our vocabulary has changed along with the volunteers and the types of things they are doing.
Following are some of the shifts I am seeing:
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I cannot tell you with certainty where all of this is taking us. I can say that I think we are in a time when we need to look long and hard at what is happening in our global society and as managers of volunteers we need to make organizational shifts to accommodate the changes that are happening around us. I, for one, look forward to the challenges ahead. I just hope that in ten years we are still not talking about the lack of daytime volunteers!