By Maryalice Crofton
If you are a manager of volunteers who has not supervised a Foster Grandparent, AmeriCorps*VISTA, Senior Companion, AmeriCorps Member, or RSVP volunteer, the headlines around Kennedy Serve America Act may have left you feeling “How nice for them but what’s in it for my program?”
As Executive Director of the Maine Commission for Community Service, I want to point out the new elements that are “in it for you.”
Did you see the Volunteer Generation Fund? The Social Innovation Fund? The Nonprofit Capacity Building Fund?
What about Silver Scholarships that volunteers over 55 can “earn” and then assign to a child, grandchild, or foster child?
Then there are Service Fellows who design their own service project and volunteer at a nonprofit that has been pre-qualified to host someone.
There are more new opportunities but, as someone pointed out, creation of the program does not mean funding.
So, let’s look at one of the new options for which funding is included in the presidential budget: The Volunteer Generation Fund.
To clarify, the name doesn’t reference an age group. It does reference the need to “generate” volunteers to support the services and activities in communities that are formally organized.
The fund’s objective is to address a problem that has been in the spotlight for almost 10 years; namely, the capacity or ability of local programs to attract, deploy, and retain volunteers.
“Capacity” isn’t a question of willingness or passion but the absence of resources to organize effectively. We all have stories of the very compassionate effort that went into meeting a local need but didn’t last. Likewise there are stories of programs that used to be reliable or meet a need but now are shadows of themselves. And there are the community needs that many folks have taken a stab at addressing but the volunteer efforts just don’t seem to work.
More than 90% of the time, when one looks under the hood at what happened and why, there were too few resources – staff, training, business systems, budget, organizational support or validation — to support the volunteers’ work. When researchers studied the issues in a formal way, they quantified the symptom (one-third of new volunteers leave after one year due to program operating issues) and identified the cause (lack of program staff to coordinate volunteers, lack of training for staff on how to manage volunteers, and low allocation of time for management of volunteers). Just last month (April 2009), the 2009 Deloitte Volunteer IMPACT Survey reported that 24% of nonprofits had no one assigned to manage the organizations’ volunteers.
Are these capacity issues relevant to Maine’s volunteer sector?
To find out, look around your community and do two things:
1. pick up a nonprofit annual report and see if you can find what volunteers accomplished for the agency, what was the value of their work (an in-kind donation to the agency), how many volunteers were involved, and which staff member is assigned to coordinate the volunteer effort.
2. ask yourself “who would I call for training or technical assistance if I wanted to start a volunteer program or get help on an issue for a volunteer program I was in charge of?”
Maine’s volunteer sector generates $868 million dollars worth of service annually yet, it is largely invisible to boards of directors and funders. And, although there are a known set of traits for high quality, sustainable volunteer operations, local operational training is scant and it is not possible to be trained as a manager of volunteers within Maine.
So how does the Volunteer Generation Fund relate to the needs of volunteer programs?
Here are the allowable uses cited in the law:
- provide technical assistance and support that strengthens the capacity of local volunteer infrastructure organizations (i.e., volunteer centers)
- provide support to community-based volunteer training clearinghouse, an institution of higher education, a volunteer collaborative partnership
- directly carry out volunteer programs
While State Service Commissions like the Maine Commission for Community Service will receive half the funding appropriated and can compete for additional monies from the Volunteer Generation Fund, much of the money will flow down into regions as grants.
In Maine, the Volunteer Generation Fund has the potential to take the Commission’s concept of “volunteer centers without walls” from the drawing board (where it’s been for 6 years) into communities. These centers would actually be small collaborations between organizations that would ensure the functions of volunteer centers are established and maintained in the area:
- a searchable volunteer-matching system to connect people with volunteer opportunities;
- volunteer management training for organizations
- activities that heighten awareness of volunteers’ impact and recognize volunteers
- identification of opportunities for volunteers to help address critical local needs
The question for our state is “what organizations care enough about the volunteer sector to undertake this work?”
And, even more exciting to contemplate are possibilities like…
- Specialized volunteer centers out of school districts that connect students with meaningful volunteer opportunities in their communities (Kansas called them VYNES);
- A Maine Service Academy that develops volunteer leaders, people who volunteer in leadership roles to organize other volunteers in activities that tackle local needs;
- A Maine School Service Corps that places service-learning coordinators in nonprofits committed to engaging youth in meeting community needs;
- Development of new peer-to-peer networks of managers of volunteers and establishment of a statewide association for managers of volunteers
- A program to link nonprofit management and business students in colleges with volunteer programs that need added staff to upgrade their operational procedures and policies;
- A scholarship fund to help staff of volunteer programs attend professional development programs;
- Project grants to local groups that organize community days of service (Martin Luther King Day, Make A Difference Day, Join Together, etc.).
- A cost-shared program through which a volunteer program could re-engineer its operation to accommodate the changed lifestyles of today’s volunteers
There are more possibilities but not an endless supply of funds. If the $10 million in the federal budget is appropriated and Maine gets its usual 0.04%, that would be $400,000. So, there is a need to set priorities and try to improve or assist the broadest range of volunteer programs with whatever happens.
In that light, perhaps the last question for this post should be one for you: “What would strengthen your program operations and, at the same time, benefit other volunteer programs in Maine?”
Maryalice Crofton is the Executive Director of the Maine Commission for Community Service and a guest blogger.
