Multiple Ways of Coordinating Volunteers With Differing Styles of Service

Abstract

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.

Models of Volunteer Management: Professional Volunteer Program Management in Social Work

“…Rehnborg's framework offers useful advice for the management of episodic volunteers (or long-term volunteers), depending on whether the goals of the participants are affiliation focused or skill focused (Table 5). Similarly, in their framework, Macduff et al (2009) present a serendipitous model of volunteer management grounded in the sporadic and sometimes spontaneous involvement of volunteers (Figure 1). In organizations that feature this kind of episodic volunteer involvement, the management practices recommended by Macduff et al (2009) are far more fitting and appropriate than the workplace analogue.…”

“…Here, social workers and managers in human service organizations should turn again to the conditional approaches for appropriate recommendations. Macduff et al (2009) describe the active involvement of volunteers in highly flexible, open-ended programs intended to affect systematic social change. Consider, for example, the task of working with advocacy groups of volunteers in the community, committed to improving the lot of new immigrants, or promoting the sustainability of the environment, or arresting social inequities.…”

“…These circumstances do not permit volunteer "management," and the universalist approach will not do. Instead, Macduff et al (2009) present more constructive advice for working with volunteers in this situation in their entrepreneurial volunteer model and social change model. Social workers encounter other, more prosaic situations in which authority is elusive.…”

“…Increasingly, however, this literature encounters academic research that questions a universalistic approach to such a broad activity and instead adopts a "contingency" approach; here (universal) best practices are applicable or appropriate but only under certain conditions (Hager & Brudney, 2011). Thus, an effective administrative approach to volunteer management should be contingent on a variety of factors, such as the type or role of volunteers to be managed, the characteristics of the volunteer program, and the culture of the organization (for example, Macduff, Netting, & O'Connor, 2009;Rehnborg, 2009;Rochester, 1999). We discuss several of the main contingency approaches in this article, but first we turn to some highly influential universal volunteer management models.…”

“…The final program type proposed by Macduff et al (2009) is the entrepreneurial program. Given its great flexibility and interest in radical change, the worldview and culture of an entrepreneurial program is opposite to a traditional program; an entrepreneurial program may consist of a single individual committed to addressing societal ills through empowerment solutions.…”