Engage Library
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…
April 2004
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,…
April 2004
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…
April 2004
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…
January 2004
One of the fastest growing areas of volunteer involvement is that of the participation of youth. This area, however, has its differences from traditional management of adults. In this issue of Along the Web we'll look at studies on what motivates youth to volunteer, how to…
January 2004
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…
January 2004
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…
January 2004
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…
January 2004
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…
January 2004
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…
January 2004
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…
January 2004
Once in a while, a volunteer is injured, or injures someone else, in the course of his or her work. Sometimes, it is just an allegation that the volunteer injured someone else; whether or not the allegation is true, a legal defense still is required. In many cases, the cost of…
October 2003
Keyboard Roundtable participants from Australia, Canada, Rumania, the United Kingdom, and the United States discuss what an "entrepreneurial volunteer" really is (a pioneer or someone who doesn't like rules? a blessing or a nightmare?) and how a volunteer program manager can…
October 2003
Lightbulb jokes aside, one of the eternal questions which shows up on a regular basis in online discussions, training sessions and inquisitive e-mails is usually framed quite simply:"What's the recommended ratio of supervisory staff to volunteers?"Susan greets this question with…
October 2003
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…
October 2003
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…
October 2003
This article advocates for people with mental illness being more accepted as volunteers. My experience in mental health issues is complex, encompassing several points of view. First and foremost, I am mentally ill myself, fighting against bipolar disorder type 1 since 1986. I…
October 2003
This training design offers four exercises (with a worksheet or other training tool for each) to help you, your board members, paid staff and/or frontline volunteers to become strategic thinkers who are constantly looking for new solutions, new options, and better ways of…
October 2003
You can tell the age of the book, The Citizen Volunteer , by the pronoun in its subtitle: His Responsibility, Role and Opportunity in Modern Society. The really ironic part is that the book was copyrighted in 1960 by the National Council of Jewish Women (NCJW)!
NCJW produced…
October 2003
This issue of Along the Web deals with a phenomenon that has gained much more attention in the past two years - volunteers who respond during disasters. As publicity about this surge of what has been called "spontaneous volunteering" grows, we can expect the phenomenon to…
October 2003