If your nonprofit is developing some resolutions for the new year, you might want to take a good and realistic look at your volunteer program. Are you in touch with the "new" volunteers? The ones who are both young and older, who want to volunteer as a family, who want to change the world, who look for ways to use their skills, who want to use the newest tools to do that work and to communicate about it?
A recent report on volunteerism in Canada revealed surprising discomfort among volunteers. An article in the Vancouver Sun provides an overview of that study and what it suggests volunteer coordinators might do to make volunteering more attractive.
In short the study revealed that...More...
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Comments
Joanne,
I agree with you that the issues are not limited to Canadian nonprofit organizations. I hear regularly from those who have had a bad volunteer experience in the United States as well. Many nonprofits do need to view volunteering differently than they have in the past. Thanks for discussing this important topic.
It is not only limited to US and Canada. In the capital of Germany, where I am living, according to statistics a lot of people are involved as volunteers. What is suprising for me is that most of them are between 46 and 65 years.
That means, that the younger generation is somehow not interested or not correctly involved in the value of volunteery work. As I was a teenager I can remember that we were motivated by our parents and others to take part in such activities. We have a very strong connected transport system here, so this should not be the reason for it.