OLD Jayne Blog on nonprofits/ngos, communications, community engagement, volunteerism, aid & development, women's empowerment, & random thoughts

Volunteering for understanding

09:36, 26 December 2009

.. Posted in Volunteerism and Volunteer Management


.. Link

As readers of my blog know, I'm oh-so-annoyed by people who portray volunteerism as important because nonprofits and community groups have a lot of work to do and you can save money by not paying people to do it. That approach is old school and it's also offensive.

If I'm working at a nonprofit and you give me all the money in the world to hire all the staff I'll ever need, I'll still reserve certain tasks for volunteers, because

• I want to show community engagement/community investment in our organization's work, 
• I want opinions that volunteers are often more willing to share than paid staff, 
• I want to target certain groups as volunteers (to ensure a diversity of involvement in the organization),
• I think certain jobs are better done by volunteers,
  
• I want those served by the organization to have opportunities to get an inside look at operations, and
• many more reasons depending on the organization and situation.

Detroit's Jewish community welcomed fellow volunteers from the area's Muslim community yesterday to take part in Mitzvah Day, the largest day of volunteering by Detroit's Jewish community. Multi-religious teams fanned out to more than 70 sites throughout metro Detroit to engage in various tasks together. Mitzvah Day, a nearly 20-year tradition in the Detroit area, is also practiced in other communities. It is so named because Mitzvah means "commandment" in Hebrew and is generally translated as a good deed. There is also a mandate in the Quran regarding doing good and giving of themselves to charity (sadaqah). For the first time, about 40 Muslims were expected to join 900 Jews for this annual day of volunteering. Leaders said it's a small but significant step in defusing tensions and promoting good will between the the three Abrahamic faith: Islam, Christianity and Judaism.

This is volunteering as a statement, volunteering as community bridge-building, volunteering as conflict resolution, and volunteering for understanding. It has nothing to do with please-come-do-these-tasks-without-pay. Measuring the success of this day will have nothing to do with assigning a monetary value to each hour volunteers provided. This is real innovation in volunteering -- nothing to do with technology and everything to do with the stated goal of volunteer involvement.

Why does your organization involve volunteers? In 2010, resolve to think about new answers to this question. Look for ways involving volunteers is somehow tied to the mission of your organization. Look for ways that involving volunteers can be a part of meeting your organization's goals for the year, like having a better diversity of supporters, or reaching demographics that are under-represented at your organization, or over-coming a reputation of being closed or inaccessible. Volunteer coordinators -- make an appointment with your organization's program staff and help them think about involving volunteers in a very new way!