Days, Hours and Minutes of Service - Enough Is Enough

For over a decade it’s been a clear, universal trend that new volunteers are seeking short-term assignments with a visible beginning, middle and end.  There are many reasons that this has now become the norm, but two are paramount.  First, everyone these days, all over the world, feels time deprived.  We are simply living at a faster pace, cramming more and more things into our schedules with less time for pursuing much beyond job and family.  Second, volunteering has a self-inflicted reputation as a bottomless pit:  initial service leads to ever-increasing expectations of more service.  And if you think you have no time at all…

Now combine the hope that people will be more attracted to serving in bite-sized chunks of time with certain holidays and commemorative dates that lend themselves to expressions of community involvement, and – voila! – we created what we commonly call a “day of service.”   

Conceptually, the idea of carrying out single days of volunteering is fine.  But it has proliferated to the point of absurdity and someone has to cry “enough!”

Formal Days in the "Seasons of Service"

Energize maintains a list of special days and weeks dedicated to volunteer work in  North America and around the world. Several years ago, Points of Light grouped such events under the heading “Seasons of Service,” recognizing that almost every month of the year offered another national or international service opportunity.  This is the list for the USA right now:

Add to this things like local United Ways’ “Days of Caring” and literally countless similar days sponsored haphazardly by single corporations (Accenture and KPMG are just two examples), individual schools and civic groups.  Also, the original HandsOn Network model was built on the concept of a month’s calendar of projects from which a young professional could select a few hours of service when  convenient.

In the end, we’ve simply created a new “bottomless pit” of unending service, one day at a time.

How about 67 Minutes?

For me, the situation came to a head two weeks ago when I learned from a New York Times reporter about the brand new Mandela Day set to launch globally on July 18 this year.  It is intended to honor Nelson Mandela, which is surely a fine idea.  But somehow the desire to give tribute to this man’s 67 years of human rights struggle morphed into a plan to ask people to do volunteer work for – wait for it! – 67 minutes.  

The Web site proclaims a lofty ambition:  Mandela Day celebrates the idea that each individual has the ability to make an imprint, the power to transform the world.  In 67 minutes??!!  Worse, although the first day is in less than two months, the site still has no concrete options for what someone can do, other than links to such sites as VolunteerMatch.

I call this the “dumbing down of volunteering.”  It is based on the unchallenged belief that only by making it easier and easier, and less burdensome, with less commitment, would anyone today be moved to serve.  This is playing out as well in some of the initiatives under the Serve America Act, which keep adding more and more cash incentives, end-of-service pay-outs and other pot sweeteners, again because lawmakers can’t envision anyone “just volunteering” any more (except for their re-election campaigns!).

In 67 minutes, isolated from any long-term commitment, someone cannot “make an imprint” on the world.  Please understand that I am not condemning service projects per se.  But anyone reading this Hot Topic knows that the types of volunteer activities someone can do in a single day – let alone seven minutes more than an hour – are of necessity going to be simple, largely unskilled, based on physical labor, etc.  Yes it is vital to get a group together to build a playground on a Saturday.  But to eradicate poverty, cure disease, end war, raise literacy rates, and other social priorities, we need staying power.  We need people who commit to being trained and to work hard towards a goal. 

Please, no more unconnected, ill-planned days or moments of service that create huge work for recipient agencies/communities, make the participants feel great, but have little intrinsic meaning!

Nelson Mandela and the world would be better served if this effort challenged people to volunteer 67 days on a focused task, even over several years.

Now How about "Micro-Volunteering"?

Just to illuminate how this trend is taking on a life of its own, have you heard of The Extraordinaries?  It is trying to organize “on-demand volunteerism by mobile phone.”  Its tag line is:  “Got a few minutes free?  Be Extraordinary.”  Not quite operational yet and awaiting an iPhone app, the site tells us that:  The Extraordinaries delivers micro-volunteer opportunities to mobile phones that can be done on-demand and on-the-spot.

In fairness, these people are trying to create a totally different model.  They say: “Our dream is to answer this: ‘What social problems can we solve with a million people working on them in brief moments of spare time?’”  And they have some interesting ideas for possible projects, including helping the Library of Congress index a backlog of thousands of historical photos.

We expect an explosion of new volunteers, as people are now able to actually fit micro tasks into their hectic lives. We provide a more efficient link between people’s brief spare time and social projects, and as new people get hooked on doing social good, we believe this will lead them to an increased engagement in their communities. Essentially, The Extraordinaries is the “gateway drug” to traditional volunteering.

We’ll see.

Some Middle Ground Suggestions

All of these service days need frontline managers of volunteer resources to create projects for the volunteers they want to send.  I propose that this gives us some collective influence.  Here are a few of my ideas and I hope you’ll all share yours.

• The Martin Luther King, Jr. Day has recently made a commitment to “semesters of service” and other longer efforts with more continuity.  Bravo to them!  We should contact the organizers of our local MLK Day events and praise this effort, asking how we can offer new volunteers attractive, longer-term projects through them.  Then we should encourage other day of service organizers to consider following suit.
• When contacted to create a day of service project, try to offer some alternatives to the volunteers themselves: 
  • Ask if people might commit to monthly or quarterly days of service, making the effort you and they put into getting them up to speed for Day 1 pay off with some repetition.
  • Train a group of volunteers on Day 1 and then ask them to “adopt” the project and rotate among themselves who will return over the course of the year to continue working on it.
  • Explain how much more interesting their volunteer work could be if they gave it enough time to become expert at it.
• In the past, Points of Light simply enabled the formation of new Days of Service.  The new HandsOn Network/Points of Light Institute should consider exercising some leadership in:
  • Recommending that groups wishing to start their own day of service select an existing day and become committed to visibly supporting that.  They can still get attention for their projects, but in support of the greater effort.
  • Talk to national day of service leaders about selecting a theme or type of volunteer work for everyone to do that year, creating an economy of scale with potential for real impact.  Right now, too many of these events say “go volunteer” for anything, dissipating the net effect.

One more time:  All of these one-time efforts are worthwhile in some ways, but we cannot allow them to sidetrack our energies.  We must keep our sights focused on making a genuine difference to the community served.  And we must truly believe that people are still willing to volunteer (or exercise civic engagement – pick your vocabulary!) with all the devotion needed.  

• Do you agree that days, hours and minutes of service are getting out of hand? How do we buck the tide?
• How do you respond when someone contacts you for mini, if not micro, volunteering?