Volunteer Managers - Step Up and Influence!

I am thoroughly enjoying my current role in the volunteerism world. Working with the largest volunteering organisation in my state, my role is to design and implement a renewed volunteer framework, policy, standards, guidelines and tools. I’m like a kid let loose in a candy store! It’s a good place to be with my career at the moment. I’ve been managing programs and leading volunteers for over 21 years. To this role I am bringing much experience and it’s a learning curve for me also.  It is also empowering to get organisational support and resources for such a big and important project and I do believe that organisations that invest in excellent volunteer management systems truly value volunteering.

It has been a reflective time for me as well. A part of me still misses the day to day contact that can come with managing volunteers. ‘It’s all about the people” is a mantra I often use for myself and it keeps me “real” in my current work.

Personally it is satisfying to be doing this current project and it goes to what we can do, as volunteer leaders, with our skills and knowledge. Too often, volunteering strategy and policy is designed by people who do not have subject matter expertise. While the involvement of HR in a collaborative way, along with other stakeholders is important for project design and input, delivering projects like these without volunteer management expertise simply does not make sense and can in fact be detrimental to volunteering.

Too often I see Volunteer Managers underselling and undervaluing their own skill set. There remains an unconscious bias, to some degree, that they are after all “just” managing volunteers. Yet, we should all know by now how complex effective volunteer management is. We should know how many skills it requires and that a skilled volunteer leader is worth their weight in gold!

What I love about volunteering the most is that it is ever changing and fluid. The volunteering space can be a breeding ground for innovation. The volunteering world is one of opportunity as well as hope. Shifting volunteering trends, customer experience and sustainability drivers require us to build and implement the appropriate standards, systems and processes to support leaders to manage volunteering resources responsibly, fairly, effectively and creatively. As trends in volunteering show, the volunteering marketplace is becoming increasingly competitive. So now is the time to be reviewing your volunteering strategy!

This is the opportunity for Volunteer Managers to step up to the plate. Maybe your organisation does not have a strategy to begin with? If not, it can all begin with a conversation and a chance for you to influence up or across in your organisation. If you have a current framework check to see if it is still current!

I still remember clearly a Volunteer Management network meeting I attended about 10 years ago. Present amongst the large group were 3 Volunteer Managers from a hospital group. They wanted to discuss a new policy their organisation had released about volunteering. They had some serious concerns about aspects of this policy. When I asked if they had been consulted about the policy before it was released they said no and actually seemed surprised I had asked! This brings me to the crux of the matter. It’s not about power and it’s not about status. As Subject Matter Experts we should have a thorough understanding of the history, culture, objectives and priorities of volunteering in our organisations. We are the ones who should have the thorough understanding of the world in which volunteering operates.

I would go as far to say that effective volunteer leadership needs far more than the operational day to day duties that go hand in hand with volunteer coordination. It needs collaboration and design skills and a strategic overview that aligns your volunteering service to your organisational mission. In the process you have the opportunity to tick the boxes of recognition, renewal, and innovation and enhancing the service you provide to the people we are helping in our communities. And at the end of the day that end result is what it is all about.

To sum up I am encouraging you to step up. Volunteer Managers should have the opportunity to influence and impact your organisations volunteering practice strategically as well as operationally.

Good luck!

 

 

 

I am saying NO to Racism - Can you Share?

This is a copy of a an article I posted to LinkedIn today. I would also like to record it on my blog. Because our volunteers matter. Because Respect matters. If you come across this article - please share the shit out of it! 

LinkedIn is not a forum for political debate and neither should it be. There is enough debate on Social media today, much of it very divisive. And hurtful.

But this post does concern the workplace and the people who work or volunteer for you. After a recent speech in the Australian parliament where a senator spoke of a “final Solution” and denigrated people of the Muslim faith my mind cast back to when I was living and working in London. Back then the IRA were active and an Irish accent was viewed with suspicion.  Many Irish were falsely detained and imprisoned. There was an atmosphere of fear and distrust and I felt it. Had someone back then said “Not all Irish are terrorists but all terrorists are Irish.” I would have been dismayed and scared.

I have managed many volunteer programs which had people of the Muslim faith in the team as well as Christians, Hindus, Buddhist, others and those of no faith.   Your faith never made a difference. You were a volunteer and your service made a difference.

The Senate speech has been roundly and rightly condemned by most people. Not all but most. Today my heart and my thoughts go out to those wonderful people I have had the privilege of meeting from different background and different religions.  I hope they feel supported in their work places this week.

I hope that our organisations are caring enough to know that this very public debate may be hurting some among our people, our staff and our volunteers. Because right now they need our support more than ever.

I find myself blessed to live in a multicultural Australia and I acknowledge the traditional owners of this land. I acknowledge too that we will have our differences but everyone in our workplace deserves respect and I hope today we give thought to some humanitarian principles that can unite us all.

Volunteering Stories

Ebony* used to volunteer for a program I managed many years ago. She used to volunteer on Mondays and Fridays and was a committed, kind and friendly volunteer. Ebony would sign in for her shift every Monday morning in the sign in book which was next to my desk. On Monday mornings, like clockwork, she would sign in at 8am on the dot with a sigh and usually a comment and then head to her volunteering post. I would sometimes check on her during the day and she would as usual be doing her task with a big smile and she seemed to love her role. But the sigh in the morning intrigued me. Ebony would often comment that the weekend had gone too quickly or say something a little negative about Mondays.

I found this intriguing because in many presentations I did on volunteering I would say that one of the joys about working with volunteers was that you never came across the volunteer who was grumpy because it was a Monday or saying out loud at the end of the week “Thank God it’s Friday eh?”  

Ebony was an exception to this rule. And I heard many a “TGIF” coming from her lips on a Friday. From a volunteer. From a person who choose to be there on a Monday and a Friday! But it was Ebony’s routine and I would often engage her in it to her delight. Had I found a tape of the Boomtown Rats “I don’t like Mondays” I would have had it playing and she would have loved that! (yeah tape – it’s that long ago!)Ebony didn’t see herself as a volunteer per se ,you see, she saw herself as “one of the team” and she loved to fit in with the people around her which allowed her to continue her slight disdain for Mondays for the rest of her life! I loved it and it taught me valuable lessons about volunteer motivation and how so many different aspects can be the prime motivators for people to volunteer.

Last week I visited another place for a meeting where I had managed volunteers over 13 years ago. Sitting in their café memories came flooding back when I saw Alison* sitting in a table near me. Alison was a volunteer at this place when I first started working there 18 years ago. Living with a disability had never hindered Alison in her inspiring work. She had inspired me back then and now sitting opposite her I felt tears well in my eyes.

I left my table to stand near hers. She didn’t recognise me at first but as soon as I said her name and she heard my accent she was standing and hugging me. In fact the hugs kept coming! Alison informed me that she had now been volunteering there for 23 years.

These are volunteering stories. This is why I do what I do.

*Names have been changed

 

 

When a take away was Fish N Chips

Is it just me or has corporate jargon come in and infected our sector? Are you now invited to a Deep Dive instead of a meeting? Do you talk about incentivizing volunteers and working on future proofing your one to one synergy? Are you now, like so many, onboarding volunteers? Imagine onboarding board members.

Are you leveraging a multidisciplinary and multifunctional volunteer team which is mission critical with awesome growth strategies? Good on you. Perhaps you are simplifying hyper-scale niche markets. As long as you are also energistically benchmarking impactful leadership skills you should be doing fine.

Remember when a take away was fish N Chips and when a deliverable was pizza at your front door? Remember when scrums were just for Rugby fields? Maybe I’m just getting old, or should I say age challenged, and I’m yearning for a simple language of old that spoke of meaning, and helping people and doing good or simply doing what you can to help others. This jargon speak hasn’t infected the volunteering sector, or should I say the volunteering space, completely yet, but the signs of its emergence are there. I think an astronaut should be the only person entitled to say “I work in that space” but I digress.

Today we need to be client-based, client-centred, client-centric and client-focused. Yesterday we just helped the person, the human being. Yesterday we helped as many people as we could. Today we need to be cross functional, cross-media, cross-platform and cross-unit. Maybe I’m just becoming a cross middle aged man! I’m not cross but I am just aware of these changes. Or should I just say I am across it. As long as I have a good ROI on volunteers I should be ok I guess. I just need to read up on block chains and supply chains but sometimes I feel like I am in chains!

I am an action man with action items! I am an enigma wrapped in a paradigm. I can embrace change but I prefer embracing humans. Although I should enthusiastically syndicate enterprise-wide catalysts for change.  This jargon speak may become, after all, part of our core competencies

I’d love for you to mind share and tell me what your take aways from this blog post are. If you are not willing to mind share right now just sense check it in real time. Because you know, in false time can’t be good.  Going forward I hope you share this article because going backwards you won’t!

And if you want to value add go right ahead. Always remember that you really can't fail with four-dimensional strategic matrix approaches.

“English, as a subject, never really got over its upstart nature. It tries to bulk itself up with hopeless jargon and specious complexity, tries to imitate subjects it can never be.” -  Zadie Smith

 

 

Jayne Cravens speaks truth to power but is anyone listening?

Jayne Cravens is an internationally-recognized author, trainer, researcher and consultant. Her work is focused on communications, volunteer involvement, community engagement, and management for non-profits, NGOs, and government initiatives.

Jayne's Blog

I’ve been a fan of Jayne's for years now and especially of her blog. I haven’t always agreed with what she says but by golly whatever her views are she articulates them so well! One thing that amazes me though is that she isn’t appearing too much at national or international conferences on Volunteering. Her voice is so unique and her contribution to the sector has been priceless. Surely these days we don’t fear strong and articulate women? If you are looking for a dynamic speaker for your next conference do the conference a favour and go book her in.

I had the pleasure of meeting Jayne once, many moons ago at a Retreat for advanced Volunteer Management in South Australia. I loved how she broke out of the echo chamber and how she challenged our assumptions. If you read her blog you will see that she continues to do so to this very  day.

Her latest blog has the most powerful statement about volunteering itself that I have seen for a long long time. Jayne writes:

“Volunteer engagement is essential to the democracy and the life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness for which my country, the USA, strives – paid staff just cannot do everything that needs to be done in this regard. Some activities are best done by volunteers – by people who aren’t being paid a wage to do certain work, who are freed from fear of being fired from a job that pays for their home, food, transportation, etc. and, therefore, able to speak more freely about what they are seeing and doing at the agency that hosts them as volunteers or in the community in which they are providing service.

But volunteer engagement does not magically happen and it is also not sustainable by mere good will and passion. Effective, sustainable volunteer engagement requires knowledge and processes.”

Even if that had been it – it would have been a powerful blog. Change the country and you could use this statement about any country when talking about volunteerism!  

But the blog goes on to talk about many important themes

“It’s long overdue for bold statements regarding public policy that affects volunteerism and community service by these associations. I’m tired of being out here on my own.”

In my response to this blog I assured Jayne that she was not on her own  .Although I often feel the same in the pursuit of speaking truth to power. I recently resigned from the board of my own association whom I feel lacks the independent voice to stand on their own feet and be proud of the fact! (More to come on that in a future blog perhaps!) And this was about our ability to have our own voice within the volunteering sector itself and nothing to do with Government! Naturally I worry that if we had the same situation as Jayne describes the silence from the Volunteer Management sector would be deafening also.

History will judge us not only by the action we took but by the silence and inaction. We live in an era where our Volunteer Management Associations are needed now more than ever. But instead of being the strong voice representing us, instead of them being a beacon of light, instead of being proudly independent, they are not just seen as irrelevant by others   - they are irrelevant.

I fear that Jayne's call to arms may fall on deaf ears. What she speaks about is really important. What she warns of is serious and has implications not just for her beautiful country but for countries around the world. But in the echo chamber of Volunteer Management we seem to be more concerned about what our titles should be and what super heroes we are on November 5^th. It simply doesn’t cut the mustard anymore!

Meanwhile volunteer activists around the globe take to the streets and are forming in groups (while our sector debates in conferences if these people are “true” volunteers!). New volunteer driven human rights organisations go from strength to strength. Globally, unions are growing louder. People are taking voluntary action in their communities harnessing the power of social media and technology. We have so much to learn from them.

When society looks back on our present in 50 years’ time they will look for the people who stood up to be counted. They will look to see who took action while human rights were being impinged. They will look at who cried out in protest when kids were locked up and when refuges were detained for years on islands. They will read about those that would not stand idly by while racism and fascism grew.

The future is already looking back at us and asking “What did you do?” Jayne Cravens spoke truth to power in her blog but is anyone listening?