We Love Our Volunteers at Community Volunteer Connections’ Volunteer Appreciation Picnic

by Stacy Ashton on September 2, 2010

Summer’s coming to a close, but we’ve got some great memories to keep us warm! August 11 was Community Volunteer Connection’s second annual Volunteer Appreciation Barbecue in Coquitlam’s Mackin Park.

I’ll let the pictures and a few statistics tell the story.

  • 52 volunteers and their families/friends appreciated

Volunteers appreciated

  • 78 hamburgers and hot dogs consumed

Burgers consumed

  • 84 cans of carbonated beverage swallowed

Beverages swallowed

  • 4 impromptu songs sung

Songs sung

  • 1 crazy game of Find It/Do It played

Games played

  • 28 prizes won

Prizes won

  • 1 giant cake eaten!

Cake eaten

Thank you to all the local stores that jumped at the chance to appreciate CVC volunteers.  Cosco provided cake!  Starbucks provided coffee!  Superstore and Safeway provided all sorts of food!  Planet Organic supplied vegan burgers and buns!  We all felt the love.

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UBC Student Maria Pidgorna: Is Volunteering Worthwhile?

by Kelly Diels on August 30, 2010

Maria Pidgorna is busy. She’s just completed her third-year as an International Relations student at UBC and while studying she’s managed to squeeze in a trip to the Ukraine, an exchange/study trip to Belgium, a research/reception job at a law firm, a blog – and she’s preparing to leave at the end of September to teach English in a village in France.

So when Maria thought about her jam-packed schedule and the possibility of volunteering/interning, she wondered: Is volunteering really worthwhile?

Now, after a summer working at her volunteer internship position with Vancouver’s  Musica Intima, her answer is:

Yes. It is. It really is.

In fact, now Maria has a hunch – nay, a full-fledged theory – that volunteering and internships are two-way, mutually beneficially arrangements. While there might be the conception that volunteering is a selfless arrangement, with the person donating her time completing a possibly boring or thankless task for the good of the community, Maria thinks the whole thing is way more reciprocal than that.

In fact, she argues, volunteering – especially during a recession - can be a way to gain essential skills that employers will no longer assume the risk of teaching you.

With Musica Intima, for example, and with the help of Karly Pinch, the Art Internship Coordinator for Career Services at UBC, Maria worked out a learning objectives agreement. She and Musica Intima outlined their mutual responsibilities to each other. Maria agreed to show up on time, with a professional work ethic, and contribute; Musica Intima agreed to teach her the skills she wanted to learn.

And by doing this, Maria knows that this summer she had the chance to develop new – and higher level – skills that a “regular” employer might not have invested the time in developing with her.

And so Maria’s theory shakes down like this: with volunteering, although you aren’t paid for your time and devotion there most definitely is compensation available for your contributions – and it is more valuable and enduring than cash. “With volunteering and interning,” says Maria, “the teaching is your compensation.”

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Mandatory Volunteering in BC Isn’t Mandatory, After All

by Kelly Diels on August 18, 2010

Mandatory volunteering! Oxymoron! Indentured servitude!

Possibly I exaggerate – but maybe not. Discussions about whether high school students ought or ought not be compelled to volunteer in order to graduate are heated.

Roughly sketched, the two opposing viewpoints look like this:

  • Extend “mandatory volunteering,” especially in schools so that young people can get into the habit of volunteering.
  • Work toward eliminating “mandatory volunteering” because, if volunteering is to continue being vital to our society, it needs to be an activity that is freely given.

And each camp is passionate about their position.

“To call mandatory community service ‘volunteering’ is a problem because then we begin to confuse the distinction between an activity that is freely chosen and something that is obligatory and perhaps not always rewarding. Volunteering should be something you choose to do because you want to do it, not because somebody made you do it.” - Linda Graff, president of Linda Graff and Associates Inc., a consulting firm in volunteerism and non-profit management.

All education is mandatory. It’s the experience that students have through their scholastic lives that helps them find their interests, passions, and role in life. A great Science teacher inspires new scientists — even though taking that Science 8 class is mandatory. In the same vein, the benefit of requiring volunteer experience to graduate lies in the experience these young volunteers have.  - Stacy Ashton, Executive Director, Community Volunteer Connections

Sometimes the internally paradoxical nature of the term itself is the problem. Is volunteering still volunteering if you’re compelled by school authorities to do it?

Sometimes it is the concept itself that is the issue:

Mirela Vukosa Giannidis, the volunteer co-ordinator at St. Christopher House in Toronto, is critical of these “mandatory volunteering” programs. “By making this mandatory, it unintentionally contributes to a negative view of volunteering,” she says. She is concerned that “a cynical view is developing that just sees volunteering as thinly disguised free labour.”

And sometimes it is both. But in the midst of these high-level and semantic debates an important fact gets lost or ignored:

High school students in BC are not required or compelled to volunteer.

“Aspect 4.1″ of the graduating portfolio requirements for British Columbia states that students must  complete “thirty hours of work or volunteer experience” (emphasis mine).

So students have a choice: get a jay-oh-bee or volunteer.

And lots of them are choosing to volunteer.

(Side note: where’s the hue and outcry about “forcing” teens to work?)

The fact that they’re choosing to volunteer means that “mandatory volunteering” isn’t terribly mandatory at all. All that the government graduation requirements do is encourage - rather than compel -  high school students to volunteer.

And that encouragement is helping BC youth find rewarding volunteer assignments – so rewarding that many, according to Stacy Ashton, complete more than their required 30 hours.

Because they choose to. Not because they have to.

———

photo credit: “Mandatory” by Only Alice on Flickr

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“Mandatory Volunteering” isn’t the Opposite of “Meaningful Volunteering”

by Kelly Diels on August 17, 2010

All education is mandatory.

It’s the experience that students have through their scholastic lives that helps them find their interests, passions, and role in life. A great Science teacher inspires new scientists — even though taking that Science 8 class is mandatory.

In the same vein, the benefit of requiring volunteer experience to graduate lies in the experience these young volunteers have.

At Community Volunteer Connections, many youth are volunteering in our CVC Flying Squad, which connects people to short-term volunteer opportunities in our community.

My favourite quote from one Flying Squad teen who volunteered at a local arts festival was “I thought it would be lame, but it was actually really cool”.

She, and many other of our Flying Squad teens, are volunteering well beyond their requirements because, hey, it’s fun!

That’s the potential of requiring volunteerism as part of education — when we involve people in meaningful volunteer opportunities, they have fun, and want to volunteer more. No downside there.

Stacy Ashton, Executive Director, Community Volunteer Connections

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Want a Busy Social Life and Lots of Friends? Volunteer. The Story of Coquitlam’s Joan Brooks.

by Kelly Diels on August 9, 2010

Helga Ovington is leading me to her office in Glen Pine Pavilion, a stunning, modern, glass enclosed space in Coquitlam. There are pool tables, a computer lab, a gym, a movie room, a cafeteria – and throngs of smiling people in each of these rooms, and in the common spaces. The place is bustling.

It is a community centre – a senior’s centre, in fact. And the vibe is hot.

I’m here to meet some of the volunteers who help the joint hum. Helga’s on staff at Glen Pine, and she’s offered to introduce me.

“You should talk to Joan – Joan will give you a tour. Joan’s a hostess today, and she’s one of our most active volunteers. She’s just great – really sharp, funny, you’ll like her. She’d be a great person to talk too, after we’re finished.”

Helga gestures towards Joan as we pass her so that I’ll recognize the gorgeous creature I need to talk too, later.

“Oh hi, Aunty Joan,” I say.

___________

Yup. Joan, the model volunteer I was angling to interview, is my aunt. My great-aunt, in fact. Joan is my grand-father’s sister.

Intrepid journalist that I am, when I was looking for sources – retirees who volunteer – I didn’t even think to start with the people I know.

But I do know (Aunty) Joan, so I know that Helga’s right: Joan is extraordinary. I make a bee-line right for her as soon as Helga and I finish our scheming and plotting.

(Ok, I was scheming and plotting. Helga was helping me in the context of her job. She’s all professional like that.)

___________

Joan and I hug, and I flutter, because I’m so excited to see her.

Aunty Joan is glamorous, you see. She’s stylish, she’s coiffed, her make up is flawless…and I could write poetry about the lines of her eyebrows. I adore a well-shaped brow.

But beyond  the surface glow, Joan is radiant. She likes people, and it shows. She knows how to instantly make a person feel comfortable and invited in.

Which she does for me, the following week, when we have lunch at her house.

Joan makes the most beautiful salmon sandwiches, on croissants (croissant-wiches?), and there are fresh vegetables – should I call them crudités in this context?  – and hot coffee, all laid out on a beautifully set table in her beautifully appointed townhouse.

(I’ve said it before, about retiree volunteers Dorothy Brovold and Charlie Hartner, but if this is what ‘retired’ and ‘senior’ looks like, it looks pretty damn fine.)

Joan and I gossip a little about our family (I’ll spare you the saucy details) and a picture of her life emerges: group trips to great restaurants, a walking club, rounds of meetings to plan events and contribute to the centre, regular visits with friends, and volunteer shifts as a hostess at Glen Pines.

I ask her how (and why?) this complicated and rich schedule came to be.

Joan tells me the back-story – and I know this story, intimately – that, in part, motivated her to volunteer after she retired.

My great-great grandmother – Joan’s mother-in-law – was famous in our family for the Art of The Guilt Trip.

When you called her, you could count on the first ten minutes of the call to be all about how you never call. When you’d visit, you’d hear about how you should visit more. It would get to the point that you’d have to steel yourself to make the call or the visit because you knew how all your failures to call and visit would be sketched out in living, vivid colour. So then you’d call and visit less.

Rinse, lather, repeat. Vicious cycle, yes?

But my great-great-grandmother was lonely. She didn’t have a lot going on, and she depended on her children and grandchildren and family to entertain her and connect her to the world from which she was slowly, sadly, disconnecting.

Joan remembered being on the receiving end of these guilt trips and resolved never to do that to her children. The more you made your family feel bad for not being around, the less they’d actually want to be around.

So Joan built herself a connected, well-populated life. She volunteers on committees and boards, she organizes trips to hot spots (new restaurants, casinos, race tracks) in the Lower Mainland, and she socializes. A lot.

Recently, she caught herself saying to her son, when he telephoned, “My goodness, it’s been a long time since we talked!”

He said, “Mom, if you were home once in a while to pick up your phone, we’d talk a lot more.”

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The Magic of Social Networking, Skype and Senior Citizens who Volunteer: An Interview with Coquitlam’s Dorothy Brovold

by Kelly Diels on August 2, 2010

Dorothy Brovold’s in love with her tech.

“I’ve got an Apple,” she tells me, her smile wide and her delight palpable. “And I’ve never had a problem. Never had a virus, it’s always fast, and I just love it. I spend a lot of time on Skype.”

Who’s the lucky Skype-ee?

“My granddaughter. I think technology has made such a difference to families. I grew up on a two-bit farm where our neighbours were miles away. Now, I can talk to my granddaughter, any time we like, wherever we are.”

We both wax lyrical about the magic of social networking and Skype. I tell her about the story I heard of an American family who sets up a big screen on their dining room table so that once a week they can have a family dinner  – via Skype – with their grandmother in the Philippines.

We’re both nodding. I’m thirty-six and she’s eighty-four and we’re in this together. We both like to connect. In fact, that’s why Dorothy enjoys volunteering.

“I’ve volunteered ever since I was a teenager,” Dorothy tells me with a naughty smile. “Another girl and I – well, we used to hold dances to raise money so we could buy cigarettes for the boys overseas.”

And she’s been volunteering – and fundraising – ever since. (Minus the cigarettes.)

Later, when Dorothy was the mother of three young boys in the TriCities, there were forty kids on the waiting list to join Scouts. With a list that long, she knew her sons wouldn’t get in.

So she started a cub pack in the basement of her house. A den mother, she’d be – literally. From then on, she was constantly organizing activities, marshalling parents and kids and communities, and fundraising.

She liked the busy-ness. She liked the people. Leading community activities and fundraising was a perfect fit – these were the same reasons Dorothy had always worked in retail before she got married.

Later, in 1981, she started first one business (New Life Maternity) and then another. Both shops were successful and Dorothy loved running them, but when she lost her husband in 1993, she decided to make some changes. She wrapped up both stores and moved to Coquitlam a few years later.

These were big changes. Now, newly widowed and no longer running two busy retail shops, Dorothy found herself “at loose ends. So I started spending time at the Wilson Centre, met a couple of friends and got involved.”

Then, two years ago, she joined the new Glen Pine Pavilion. She plays dominos, takes a painting class, calls bingo, and participates in the Joint Planning committee and the Board that runs the centre.

Glen Pine is “like a home away from home,” says Dorothy, “and it is just that to a lot of people. I’ve made a lot of new friends, and there is just a beautiful spirit, here.”

“It fills the gap,” she tells me, about volunteering. “That’s what I wish other people knew: that you can’t sit back. You have to give of yourself.”

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Mobilizing Volunteers: How to win $25K in 24 hours

by Kelly Diels on July 30, 2010

I knew New Westminster had a 50/50 chance of winning $25,000 in The Sports Network Kraft Celebration Tour contest.

We were going up against a curling club in Nelson, BC.  From 9:00 a.m. July 23 to 8:59 a.m. July 24, people could vote on which community they wanted to see win.

Our awesome Youth Centre @ Moody Park versus a curling club in Nelson?  Who wouldn’t vote for us?

Then, the day before the vote, I found out voting wasn’t one person-one vote, but unlimited!  You could vote as many times as you could stand to type two unrelated words into a box:  quixotic / renegade; starship / celery; episode / albino … if you voted, you know what I’m talking about.

Well, Nelson is not too shabby at community mobilization.  Darn it!  If I’d realized this sooner, Community Volunteer Connections could have helped pull together a team of volunteers to vote non-stop for 24 hours straight!

Imagine my joy when I found out the youth-led Fundraising Campaign for the Youth Centre @ Moody Park was already all over it.  On July 24, the New Westminster Public Library opened its doors to a team of local teens, who took over the library’s 22 Internet stations and voted all night long.

Their energy inspired others in New Westminster to sit bleary-eyed in front of their computer screens, sustaining themselves with Kraft dinner.  New Westies like my hubbie and city councilor Jaimie McEvoy and city councilor Jonathon Cote, who wagered dinner with spouse on who could stay up voting the latest. (Note:  My boy won, so I get a free dinner out of the deal – ain’t doing good great?)

All in all, New Westminster pulled in 220,531 votes, clobbering Nelson’s 154,709 votes by over 65,000 votes.  And we’re another $25,000 closer to the $200,000 fundraising goal to make the Youth Centre @ Moody Park a facility worthy of our fabulous teens.

That’s what I call mobilizing a community of volunteers.  New West rocks!

Photo credit:  Newrambler (via Flickr)

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Volunteer Recognition: Say Thank You – And MEAN IT

by Desiree Adaway on July 29, 2010

by Desiree Adaway

It is a paradox—people’s willingness to volunteer versus the system’s capacity to use them effectively~Tom Weidmeyer, COO of United Parcel Service

You’re a volunteer. You have been reading this blog (thank you!) and you’ve been inspired to help.   Thanks so much  for stepping up. I appreciate you giving your gifts to help heal the world and build stronger, healthier communities.

This post is not for you.

It’s REALLY for the organization you will be volunteering with or maybe it’s for the organization you work with.

(You may want to print a copy and take with you, post it on a bulletin board in the kitchen.)

————–

Now that you have an increase in the number of savvy, smart, high-skilled folks who believe in your mission and want to volunteer, what do you do with them and how do you keep them?

Here are few basics:

  • All volunteer programs should be customer focused,
  • competitive in the context of other volunteer opportunities, and
  • develop volunteers into future leaders of the organization.

If your programs do not  hit these three points and hit them WELL,  then we need to talk. Specifically, we need to talk about Strategies for Moving Volunteers from Success to Significance.

For now, however, let’s start at the end…

make sure you recognize and thank volunteers every step of the way.

The success of any volunteer organization relies on its ability to attract and retain dedicated and enthusiastic volunteers., so it is important to recognize the contributions of volunteers to your organization. It is partly through this recognition that volunteers gain the motivation to stay involved.

Do not be afraid to think creatively when it comes to thanking volunteers!

Here are some ideas to get you started:

Praise Them…

  • Offer public praise
  • Offer meaningful praise
  • Praise them to friends, loved ones, employers
  • Write letters of recommendation

Food for Thanks…

  • Offer coffee and treats
  • Throw pizza or ice cream parties
  • Invite committee members out to lunch to celebrate a project

Tokens of Appreciation…

  • Letters, postcards, emails of appreciation
  • Tokens; key chains, pens, pins, mugs, t-shirts, hats, etc
  • Offer gift certificates or coupons to local eateries or entertainment facilities
  • Design T-shirts and give them to volunteers
  • Create volunteer Name badges
  • Send birthday, anniversary and holiday cards Arrange discounts at local shops
  • Offer progressive recognition, giving greater rewards for successive milestones achieved

Skills Training…

  • Pay registration fees for conferences
  • Invite volunteers to participate in workshops and involve them as speakers

Public Recognition…

  • Include volunteers’ names on recognition plaques or billboards in public areas.
  • Recognize them at staff or board meetings.
  • Nominate a volunteer for a leadership position.
  • Write articles about your volunteers in  local newspaper, or on your website.
  • Create a yearbook of volunteers.
  • Host formal recognition events (lunches, dinners, teas, etc.)
  • Produce a video of individuals’ contributions to your affiliate.
  • Start an award program; “Volunteer of the Month/Year”
  • Nominate volunteers for community, state, or national awards

Invite them to deepen their involvement…

  • Ask volunteers for input and feedback on programs, policies, goals, etc.
  • Include them in planning meetings
  • Ask for their help in training new volunteers
  • Give them more complex assignments or more responsibility

Keep them informed…

  • Let them know the impact of their contributions
  • Send newsletters with important relevant information

Over the next few weeks I will write post that will look at concrete steps to help move a volunteer from an occasional one- off volunteer to a long term donor and advocate for your organization.

The concept is simple:  a strong , trained base of volunteers and “grass roots, local, concrete work” will continue to differentiate your organization from other organizations. In 2010 be more strategic in how, when and where you utilize your  volunteers and their gifts.

Oh yeah– and do not forget to say thank you. And mean it.

————–

watch this space for more perspectives on volunteer recognition, from volunteers and from volunteer coordinators.

There *might* be a little controversy.

One volunteer tells us to ignore everything on the lists above. She doesn’t want gifts and lunches. She just wants a phone call saying thank you. She wants a direct relationship with the people she works with. She wants to know her effort is appreciated.

Another volunteer coordinator talks about the guilt some coordinators feel about working with and “using” volunteers…and how that guilt is actually condescending.

And yet another volunteer coordinator tells us that non-profit organizations are not the same as volunteer organizations. Their mission is not to provide volunteer opportunities and develop volunteers – although they do that – but to advance the objective of their organization and the community it serves. And so “customer-focused” doesn’t mean the customer is the volunteer; the customer is the community.

So…stay tuned. Lots of diverse and challenging perspectives on volunteer recognition to come…

Ouch.

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Eighty Two Reasons to Volunteer, According to Charlie Hartner

July 26, 2010

It’s a good thing Charlie Hartner is married because he’s the kind of guy who throws a woman off her game.
(Especially if her game is “impartial” journalism.)
Charlie has a mischievous grin, an easy laugh, and sparkling eyes. He’s courtly. He likes to dance. When he’s not volunteering in his community, he helps throw free beer-and-pizza [...]

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How (and Why) To Volunteer: Giving Thanks by Giving Yourself

July 22, 2010

It’s Christmas in July!
Whaaaa? you say.
That’s right…Christmas in July.
The tricities  Share Food Bank says that
The generosity in food donations through Christmas 2009 was extraordinary.
These donations have stretched right through June even though the number of people coming to the Food Bank has been so much higher.
But now the stock of food in their food bank [...]

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