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 authors, a practitioner and an academician, report on their collaboration over a 4-year period as opportunities arose in which itCollaboration, teaming, partnering, coalition, and alliance-building are buzzwords often heard in contemporary jargon. They are so often heard that they may be taken for granted, assuming that everyone is collaborating or knows how to collaborate. Greenwood and Levin (1998) go so far as to assert that collaborative inquiry better addresses nearly all problems, conceptual, empirical, or political. However, the fiction that "everyone knows how to collaborate" is exposed daily as practitioners and academicians attempt to work together only to find out that hard work and a setting aside of egos is only a beginning step in building relationships that work across diverse interests and systems.In this article, the authors provide a context for collaboration and ground their experiences in a diverse literature that looks at how professionals form
The problem of homeless people is not confined to urban areas. Volunteer organizations in rural areas are experiencing an increase in the demand for services. This study examines a needs assessment method to help volunteer organizations engage in collaborative planning. It specifically addresses the advantages of the Task Force Model in a rural setting and describes design changes in the needs assessment technique that were utilized to reduce the disadvantages.In 1985, the Washington State Legislature, in response to organizations requesting help to meet the needs of the increasing homeless population, asked the state's Department of Social and Health Services (a welfare and social service agency commonly referred to as DSHS) to determine the extent of the problem and to evaluate resources for the homeless throughout the state.Since voluntary organizations provided the bulk of the service to the homeless, in both rural and urban areas, DSHS staff had to develop a data collection method that would involve the volunteer service providers in the process. Since an important feature of all DSHS services had been extensive involvement with volunteer organizations, a close working relationship already existed between the public and private sector in most communities. This study examines the strategy of data collection used by one DSHS Regional Administration for a rural area in Washington, the Task Force Needs Assessment Technique: Is it useful in engaging volunteer organizations in collaborative planning? Are the advantages of the technique sufficient to overcome the disadvantages? Can changes in the model design overcome the disadvantages? DSHS Region 2 is a rural area of 8 counties about 30,000 square miles, in the southeastern sector of Washington. It is bounded by the Snake River on the north, the Oregon border on the south, and the Idaho border on the east. The largest city is Yakima (50,000) with three adjacent cities, Pasco, Richland, and Kennewick, commonly called Tri-Cities (114,000) making up the largest population area. The economy is mainly a rural agricultural base. The Tri-Cities' main industry is nuclear power plants and research facilities.The homeless population in this region 'is served exclusively by private voluntary organizations. Information was collected by DSHS to help understand: (1) the problems of the homeless in a rural area; (2) the volunteer sector serving that population at Bobst Library, New York University on June 26, 2015 nvs.sagepub.com Downloaded from
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