Apparently forethought isn’t one of the skills they should plan to share
Posted by MoreCoffeePlease on 16 Nov 2009 at 02:18 pm | Tagged as: Business, Current Events
Ah, woe. Carol Goar reports that retiring baby boomers plan to spend time volunteering, but:
But for the most part, the non-profit sector is not waiting with open arms for retired baby boomers with skills to share and time to spare.
“Logically, it should be a great opportunity,” says Michael Hall, vice-president of Imagine Canada, the umbrella organization for charities and non-profit organizations across the country. “But few organizations have the infrastructure to manage volunteers.
“You need to orient them, assist them and integrate them into your team. But where are the resources? Most organizations are stretched thin.”
Mmmhmm. And who, one might ask, was in charge a decade ago when nonprofits were told to “act more like businesses,” convert to a contract basis and stretch themselves so very thin, resulting in the current lack of capacity to manage volunteers?
Yeah. Boomers.
Set up the volunteers to administrate themselves; the various heritage/historical societies provide a model. The Province paid for megabucks legal advice to provide any historical society/museum support society with a model constitution which could be adapted and widely used. In the olden days I was president on and off of a heritage umbrella organization and we used this constitution at least 10 times. It provides a structure for volunteers attached to a paid-staff institution to generously interact. At one point the HAMILTON-SCOURGE Society had a skills list for each of oh, maybe 150 members, and, just for example, when Bob Ballard wished to dismantle computer equipment on a barge, we were able to provide two volunteers whose volunteered expertise that was–and the match had to do with prior data-collection, of course.
It’s a whole field of endeavour for a staff member to make the most of volunteers and this is optimally done by setting up an independent volunteer organization which is self-administrated; you’d be very good at this, Robyn, if it interested you. Done well, this is mostly interface, by contrast to what is usually understood to be administration.
In a big volunteer organization, many people come with vast amounts of administrative experience; they administer themselves if organized independently. You can contract volunteers, of course, as does the Boston Museum of Fine Arts, which contracts for years-long contributions within its independent volunteer organization.
It shouldn’t be a problem to use every erg of a volunteer army if we are lucky enough to have one, if it’s set up so they do nearly all of it themselves.