April brings National Volunteer Week in the USA and, as I feel every year, I wonder if anyone cares. Certainly just about no one outside of our field has ever heard of National Volunteer Week. Why?
The phrase “streams of service” conveys the image of various forms of service, all starting from different sources, eventually combining into a mighty river. Or do we just have puddles? IYV provides a prism throught which to see our field.
Ivan Scheier's new book is about dreams that die while others live and prosper. And he shares how we can be both a dreamer or a “Dream-Catcher”--a person who nurtures the dream-chaser towards accomplishing the dream.
Guest writer Linda Graff points out: "When an organization says let's do a cost-benefit analysis on volunteer involvement, it seems a reasonable thing to do...[but] we don't know how to measure the value of volunteering." Provocative and important reading.
As more formerly nonprofit services become for-profit businesses, the question of whether or not volunteers should continue to give unpaid time in such settings deserves attention. The answer is not always clear.
Happy New Year and new millennium! Susan uses this milestone to envision her hopes for the future of professional development in our field, along with some move-it-forward resolutions.
Let’s use the start of the new century as an opportunity to to ask some genuinely hard questions about volunteer involvement in our organizations--what have we really accomplished and where do we want to go?
Here's a caution to all to examine the assumptions behind the “conclusions” reached by the new Independent Sector “Giving and Volunteering” in the U.S. study--or any other attempt to quantify volunteer activity.
The volunteer field's perspective was absent from the White House Conference on Philanthropy (guess they only meant money), as well as from discussions about “civic engagement,” “civil society,” and other community themes. Why?
Susan shares her list of major trends in the field right now. Do you see the same things, in the same way? Differently? And, even more important, what other issues do you see surfacing for the volunteer world--both good and bad?
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