Out of the cocoon and educate!For some years now I have been advocating to the Volunteer Management sector that we are responsible for educating others about what we do and why we exist! By others I mean, the community at large, other sectors and Government. We sometimes bemoan the fact that some people don’t understand our roles and I’ve argued that we need to actively get out there and inform them and not wait for them to come to us with the question “so what exactly is Volunteer Management?”.
This is why I am a strong supporter of International Volunteer Managers’ Day. Though some of my colleagues are less inclined to support what they misperceive as “ volunteer manager pat on the back and self praise is no praise day” I see the day as a great instrument that can be used to educate people about the awesome field I find myself in!
But recently I’ve encountered a phenomenon that slightly worries me and makes me wonder if I have been channeling too much energy into advocating for the recognition of volunteer management. I wonder too, to use an old cliché, that if in some ways we are putting the cart before the horse.
Does the community at large understand volunteering? Do we as a volunteer management sector assume that they do?
We spend a lot of our time debating the definitions of volunteering. We get very excited talking about all types of volunteering be it episodic, strategic, virtual, micro, traditional, emerging trends etc. All well and good. As a sector we are fairly informed and as coordinators and managers we are rather up to speed and adaptable as well as flexible to change. After all, we have the world of knowledge at our fingertips. Resources are a plenty and there is no shortage of information on volunteer management out there.
But are we too warm and comfortable within our cocoon?
What if Volunteering isn’t really understood by society at large? I am not saying that this is the case and I have no hard and conclusive evidence to back up such a claim but some recent events have stirred my curiosity and have at least prompted the question in my own mind.
There is a heap of literature out there about volunteering. Or is there? Google volunteering and you will get over 14 million hits. But a lot of this information is the “how to” and “where to” and “join us” of volunteering. Of course people have written papers on the subject of volunteering, academics have explored and investigated volunteering, peak bodies and national bodies encourage volunteering and some provide education on volunteering. We as volunteer managers or coordinators read up on trends in volunteering. Actually we are at the coalface and are the first to discover these trends emerging in many instances!
And yes – millions of people in hundreds of nations do some volunteering. But many millions more don’t! And we have to acknowledge that even a percentage of society does not support volunteering at all and in fact think its wrong!! I once spent an entire evening arguing with someone the case for volunteering! This person absolutely was anti volunteering in all its forms and was able to articulate his case quite intelligently; a fact I must acknowledge even though I disagreed with him wholly!
This leads me to the recent experiences that got me thinking about volunteering. Every month I or the volunteer coordinator at my workplace does a presentation on volunteering for new staff at their orientation day. We not only talk about what volunteers do at our agency but we talk a little about volunteering in general quoting some facts and figures along the way. We also do a little quiz. A few points to note:
- The majority of people are amazed by the number of people who volunteer in our society.
- Most people are shocked when they are informed about the age groups who do the most volunteering
- When asked to close their eyes and picture a volunteer and recount to us their perception most will say “a retired lady, in her seventies”
- Most are astounded to discover that a large proportion of our volunteering team is under 25.
Since we have been doing this style of presentation where we involve the staff we have been getting the same answers and the same looks of shock month after month for a year.
I have had the pleasure of volunteering my time over the last year to visit various community groups and organisations and present on volunteering. The reactions have been the same. Young people volunteering in such numbers? Never! Virtual volunteering? What the dickens is that? For the purpose of this post I will ignore another statement I hear often – “volunteer manager? Do you get paid for that?”. That comes back to education on volunteer management.
Now I expect volunteer centre’s and peak bodies to argue that they work hard to educate the community on volunteering and I certainly won’t disagree with them on that.
But I am wondering if we have a role to play on educating society about volunteering. As a volunteer management sector can it be argued that in order for us to be more rounded do we need to incorporate playing the roll of educating on volunteering when and where we can. Can we find the time to volunteer to do such a role and cannot such a role have the potential to strengthen our own sector as it makes us more visual and sees us taking a lead role in the promotion of volunteerism! A win-win situation?
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Comments
Hi DJ
I totally agree with you. The wider community has a very limited and somewhat old fashioned view of what a volunteer looks like. Often this misperception is gained from a television series depicting hospital volunteers wearing pink pinnafores pushing tea trolleys around wards. Whenever I say that I am a volunteer coordinator I either get the "ah how nice" statements or is that a paid job? It is a lack of valid, recent information that produces these statements.
You're right DJ, It is about educating society on volunteering. Some volunteers are more visable to the public than others such as in Australia the Surf Life Savers, who battle the surf to save people's lives, the State Emergency Service, easily identifiable by their highly visable orange overalls, out in storms putting tarpolins on houses. In country areas the Rural Fire Brigades, put out fires and attend vehicle accidents.
There are many other volunteers who are not on the 6 o'clock news during times of extreme weather conditions or high drama. Yet these volunteers may perform just as valuable a service. They may provide companionship to a hospital patient who otherwise may not have any visitors at a time when they are feeling scared, and lonely. The volunteer may be listening to a child read as part of a reading program in a school. The volunteer may be participating in activities at a youth drop in centre. The value of a kind word or someone to listen is often overlooked in the highly visable representaion of volunteers in the media.
You are so right DJ, education is the key and it is up to all of us to keep telling people we meet about volunteers - what they do, where they come from and how their efforts impact on other people's lives.
Thank you for your thought provoking article DJ. Keep challenging us in the sector to believe in ourselves and strengthen our sector through education of the community.
I get what you mean and there are schemes out there that challenge what the traditional charity shop volunteer looks like. Another issue is that there are people volunteering out there that don't even know it many times have i met poeple who have siad they have never volunteered when they have, they're doing it because they like it. However i think some people use the term a bit to loose, i see volunteering as something people want to do, whereas some schemes force people in paticular to 'volunteer' which isn't volunteering in my eyes, someone volunteers because they want to.
Hi there DJ - I've kind of hesitated to jump in here because the issues you range are so massive, it's difficult to do them justice in one comment. Perhaps growing forums like i-volunteer will take up these issues in a more sustained way over the coming weeks, months, years :-) The call to action you articulate and related issues is something that comes through in a lot of posts on here for example. Carol Carbine's recent post is a good case in point.
I'm a strong believer in the necessity for those in volunteer management to raise awareness of the craft and value of volunteering is our respective societies and communities. One issue I'd raise in connection with this is the debate about whether volunteering is a means to an end (as with fundraising) - volunteering's value is in how it enables us to reach our goals as charities, orgs, movements, etc. This is something we've been discussing at the Association of Volunteer Managers. Is our approach to volunteering very rational? We do it because of specific social impacts, and we adjust how we develop volunteering based on where it is seen to be having biggest impacts.
Or is volunteering an end in itself? Is it something more akin to a kind of belief system where we believe in its value- and we don't a priori need the benefits and worth spelt out or measurable (although having evidence of impact never hurts- not having it doesn't deter us from volunteering or developing that kind of volunteering programme).
I raise this debate because I think it heavily influences the way we explain volunteering to a broader public. It's affects the way we seek to persuade the volunteering doubters and skeptics. For example, if we see volunteering as a means to an end - we seek to persuade through evidence of impact. If we believe in volunteering as an end itself, we focus on the intrinsic value of volunteering and how it fits in the concept of civil society. Of course, in reality we use take arguments from both sides. But I think it is interesting to consider these two approaches and routes to valuing volunteering.
Just to throw a slight curve ball at this one - what about those instances of Employer Supported Volunteering where the intention (and let's be honest about this) is more about developing a relationship with a company that may lead to financial support further down the line. In some of these cases the volunteering is neither a means to an end in that it provides a tangible benefit towards the cause of the organisation, nor an end in itself as the individual volunteers may not always view it in a completely positive light or feel that they are in fact volunteering.
In these situations, the question is more - "how do we ensure quality volunteering opportunities that achieve at least one of the options - and how do we prioritise which?"
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