I draw you in dear
reader with a provocative headline. In reality the title refers to the word “Volunteering”
Rob Jackson put it
so well in a recent comment of his that there is no problem with the word
volunteering. Rather there is an issue with the perception of volunteering.
There are issues with
the perception of a volunteer and therefore by extension the Volunteer Manager.
But it’s the word Volunteering
I am looking at here.
There has been
some dialogue and movement of late to disassociate from the word Volunteer. I
have seen some debate about the need to capture new audiences utilising a
different framework to describe how people give time, freely for the benefit of
others.
I am with Rob
Jackson. It’s the perception of volunteering in our communities that we need to
work with and not the semantics.
Volunteering is
amazing. It is life changing. It is inspiring. Volunteers are making an
enormous impact on our society and communities but we are utilising a dated
viewpoint on such activity.
As National
Volunteer Week approaches here in Australia watch out for the speeches that
include the lines “Volunteers are the backbone of our society” and “Volunteers
are the lifeblood of our organisation” etc. etc. Ad Nauseam.
This has become
Lazyspeak because volunteering is much more than that and we are tired of
hearing the same platitudes rolled out once a year especially when volunteering
is undervalued and under resourced at an organisational and sector level.
And if I have just
ruined your volunteer recognition speech check out my Thank you speech to
Volunteers I wrote 8 years ago and which I still believe should be the type of
language we should use around volunteering. http://djcronin.blogspot.com.au/2010/06/thank-you-speech-for-volunteers.html
‘As a volunteer you bring much to this organisation. Skills,
advice, experience, friendship, vision, leadership, inspiration etc.’
When you hear the word Volunteer what image do you conjure up in your
mind? What unconscious bias may be there?
Getting rid of the word itself won’t help. Educating our organisations
and our society and our Government on the massive impact of volunteering will!
And those of us who understand volunteering have a massive job to do. Let’s
do it, change perceptions and encourage millions more to take voluntary action!
