Engage Library
For the last decade, we’ve watched professional associations of volunteer program managers – on local, state/provincial, national and even international levels - launch, thrive, wither, revive or stagnate in dozens of countries. Our conclusion? There is still no consistency of…
January 2010
When screen writer and public relations consultant Jennifer Dornbush volunteered to be a guinea pig for a friend working towards her Myers-Briggs® certification, she had no idea how much taking a personality assessment would change the way she viewed volunteerism. As a long-time…
January 2010
Volunteer manager D.J. Cronin has a passion for volunteerism and the sector of volunteer management. He believes that volunteerism is an agent for real and tangible change around the globe and a key to harnessing volunteer effort. And he believes that in today’s busy and…
January 2010
There’s a huge train leaving the station, and it’s loaded with resources that many say have the potential to fire a capacity building revolution in the nonprofit/government organization service “industry.” Let’s call it “The Pro Bono Express.” Pro bono is the latest buzzword…
January 2010
In 1990, the Bethlehem Area School District in Bethlehem, PA., decided that every public high school student would perform 60 hours of unpaid community service during high school. The District gave students an open-ended list of approved organizations where they could perform…
July 2009
Over the last few years, we have seen employer-supported volunteering grow into a vital element of the volunteerism field around the world. More recently, we’ve begun to see a shift from the so-called “team challenge” approach to volunteering (where teams of employees perform a…
July 2009
Readers of e-Volunteerism and users of the Web site often want to find evidence to support the impact of volunteering. In short, does volunteering work? Finding evidence to support volunteering can be tricky, for all sorts of reasons. This edition of Research to Practice looks…
July 2009
One of the fastest growing and most significant new ways of volunteering in the past 20 years has been volunteering through one’s workplace. Major corporations have created extensive programs to encourage and enable their employees to volunteer and this form of business social…
July 2009
The Internet increasingly provides a means for nonprofits and government organizations to engage with people in their circles of influence. More and more organizations are blogging and posting YouTube videos and, more importantly, a great many organizations are asking their…
July 2009
Over the years we’ve seen an impressive array of attempts to “re-conceptualize” volunteering, at least to re-name it. Last fall, the United States saw a flurry of special events, legislative proposals and media attention focused on the subject of “service.” It was brought to a…
July 2009
How does the depressed global economy translate into something positive for volunteering? In this e-Volunteerism feature, Marzia Baldassari, a member of the Volunteering Ireland Team and Coordinator of the Dublin City North Volunteer Centre, answers this question. With Ireland…
July 2009
Paula J. Beugen, an active leader in the field of volunteerism and volunteer resources management for more than three decades, has observed legislation passed in her home state of Minnesota from the 1980s to the present. In this e-Volunteerism feature, Beugen asks why the needs…
July 2009
The civic disengagement of youth has been a notable concern for policy makers and academics in Canada and around the world. In fact, today’s young people have been often described as the “civic deficit” generation, resulting in calls for new programs in civic education and…
July 2009
It’s official. YouTube isn’t just for silliness anymore. The richness and variety of the videos that people now post online are quite amazing, and so it should come as no surprise that volunteering is among the subjects represented. In this Voices from the Past, we’ll link…
April 2009
Over the last few years, we have seen employer-supported volunteering grow into a vital element of the volunteerism field around the world. More recently, we’ve begun to see a shift from the so-called “team challenge” approach to volunteering (where teams of employees perform a…
April 2009
Research To Practice takes its eye off research about volunteers in this issue and instead takes a look at that other vital resource – the people who look after volunteers. Call them managers or coordinators and any one of the myriad of other names that become attached to people…
April 2009
The Internet now offers a fascinating array of tools and techniques for managing volunteers – VolunteerMatch, Facebook, blogs, Vlogs, Wikis, Twitter and many others. In this Along the Web, we take a look at these and other cutting-edge tools. After a quick research review on…
April 2009
In these incredibly difficult economic times, there is perhaps one silver lining: volunteer resources. For those organizations wise enough to seize it, the economic crisis can be viewed as an opportunity to take advantage of the skills and ambitions that today’s volunteers have…
April 2009
We’ve worked diligently to raise the standards of volunteer management. But we shouldn’t lose sight of some of the things that make volunteering different from paid employment, and help capture the volunteer spirit. In the past decade or so, we’ve tackled two types of…
April 2009
When a volunteer walks through a manager’s door, each volunteer brings along a whole system of expectations, wishes and demands associated with the volunteer experience. Volunteer managers often recognize one category of expectations as the “fantasy world” of the volunteer.…
April 2009