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Volunteers:

To volunteer is to choose to act in recognition of a need, with an attitude of social responsibility and without concern for monetary profit, going beyond ones’ basic obligations.  

Susan Ellis & Katherine Noyes

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 Creating a Vision for Volunteer Involvement:

The very essence of leadership is you have to have a vision.  It’s got to be a vision you articulate clearly and forcefully on every occasion.  You can’t blow an uncertain trumpet.

Theodore Hesburg

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 Rationale for Volunteer Program:

Most organizations do not really know why they use volunteers and have not articulated definitions or policies regarding volunteers.  Why, then, is it surprising that these organizations are muddled in their perspective on the manager of volunteers? 

Susan Ellis

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Volunteer Job Descriptions:

Recruiting before designing jobs is rather like trying to dance before the music begins.  The possibility of ending up out of step is very good indeed.  

Marlene Wilson

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Recruiting Volunteers:

Like so many other things in life, success as a recruiter of volunteers is highly dependent on attitude.  If you can’t imagine that anyone will volunteer for you, they probably won’t.  On the other hand, if you approach recruiting with a positive set of expectations, you will find that people will indeed join up.  

Susan Ellis

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Interviewing Volunteers:

One of the greatest faults of many volunteer programs is under-utilizing those volunteers who have unusual skills, organizational capabilities or extraordinary potential.  These people frequently go undetected because no one interviewed them effectively and once they were placed, they were forgotten.  

Marlene Wilson

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Training Volunteers:

We expect volunteers to “fit in,” yet we often leave them on their own to discover just exactly how they are expected to do this.  This type of trial-and-error training is costly in time and people.  It reminds me of doing marriage counseling and hearing repeatedly that one partner expected the other to read his/her mind, anticipate his/her needs and desires, and “just know” how to fulfill them.  Few of us are mind readers, yet we expect our volunteers to know what we want and how to do it. 

 Nora Silver

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**Quotes are derived from the book: Volunteer Management, Mobilizing all the Resources of the Community By Steve McCurley and Rick Lynch.