Volunteerism is changing, and traditional ways of coordinating volunteers need re-examination in order for human service programs to survive. Our practitioner/academician team has been using wellknown frameworks to reveal deep-seated assumptions about how people volunteer at the dawn of the 21st century and how changes in volunteering influence the organization and coordination of those efforts. The different styles of volunteering demand that coordinators' engagement strategies vary when different worldviews are held. In this article, four types of volunteer programs are identified: traditional, social change, serendipity, and entrepreneurial. Examples of each program type are provided, along with guidelines for their oversight. We conclude with a call for research that examines the important differences in how to appropriately use the talents of increasingly diverse types of volunteers in community practice.
The backdrop for this article is the continuing drama of changing roles and relationships among health care professionals. This article reports the results of a study of the professional identities, roles, and relationships of case managers in nine demonstration sites around the United States. Funded by the John A. Hartford Foundation, the demonstration projects use diverse personnel to enhance the role of primary care physicians in practice with elderly people. Implications for health care social workers, educators, and community-based providers are presented.
In this grounded theory research project, face-to-face interviews were conducted with program participants, board members, administrators, coordinators, and collaborators in 15 faith-based programs. Findings concerning the roles played by participants, volunteers, and paid staff reveal the wearing of multiple hats, facilitated by a tendency toward cross-training, role diffusion, and doing what is needed. Boundaries created by roles appear to be less important than pragmatically responding to meet human needs. The moral imperative or faith-based nature of the work appears to be a recruiting tool for both paid staff and volunteers, as well as an expressed personal benefit for both. Challenges include turnover among paid staff and volunteers, heavy reliance on volunteers, and low pay. Psychological contracting with a faith-based community may be related to the ability to cope with fluid role expectations and associated ambiguities.
Macro social work practice includes those activities performed in organizational, community, and policy arenas. Macro practice has a diverse history that reveals conflicting ideologies and multiple theoretical perspectives. Programmatic, organizational, community, and policy dimensions of macro practice underscore the social work profession's emphasis on using a person-in-environment perspective. Thus, social workers, regardless of roles played, are expected to have sensitivity toward and engage in macro practice activities.
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