Imagining the future normal of volunteering
As Volunteering Auckland celebrates our annual LoVE Awards - honouring amazing Leaders of Volunteer Engagement and outstanding volunteer programmes – we asked Sudha Bhana, Co-Chair of Volunteering New Zealand¸ for her thoughts on ‘What’s Our Future Normal?', and what Volunteering New Zealand is doing, or planning to do, that will support that.
Imagine the future normal
Imagine a future where it is normal for Volunteer Management to be well resourced and supported in our community organisations. Where it is normal for volunteer managers to be paid well, have regular professional development, and recognition for their vital role.
It should be normal for volunteer management teams to have the right resources to carry out their jobs effectively; and enough time to engage well with their volunteers.
We know recent years have seen significant challenges for community organisations and volunteering. The Covid-19 pandemic continues to cast a long shadow over the sector and organisations are struggling with access to funding and other resource gaps, while the demand for services continues to grow.
However, at Volunteering New Zealand we see volunteer managers as changemakers. You can see where you want to go, and can make it happen. Volunteering NZ works to support you. For almost 25 years, we have been tirelessly advocating for the rights of volunteers and for the visibility and resourcing of the volunteer sector.
Best Practice Guidelines
We now have Volunteer Best Practice Guidelines. These were co-designed with the sector and published last year – along with online templates, resources and other ‘useful stuff’.
As one sector leader told us,
“The Volunteer Best Practice Guidelines give you permission to refer to best practice. It helps the organisation to understand the volunteer service isn’t some kind of amateur hour; we too have professional guidelines.”
Several volunteer centres have been running training workshops in the use of the guidelines and associated resources. Volunteering New Zealand has upcoming Best Practice Guidelines online workshops – an introductory one, and workshops delving into each of the seven practice areas.
Advocacy and data
We continue to support and input into the work of the government’s Cross Agency Steering Group on volunteering. This has included work to reduce the compliance burden on organisations, such as police vetting. We are providing advice to volunteer organisations about volunteer screening.
We advocate for better and more data about volunteering to support organisations. Our State of Volunteering reports are good at surfacing information and insights to support leaders of volunteer engagement. We also advocate for population-wide data, such as from Statistics New Zealand, to be captured and made available. The latest data is from the General Social Survey, 2021, which asked a representative sample of the population about their activities in the previous month, including unpaid work. It found that 50.7% of us do formal or informal volunteering.
There is a time-lag, and even if Stats NZ is capturing some data, they aren’t analysing it for our needs, so we continue to ask for this.
And we continue to advocate to funders on the needs of volunteer programmes to be properly resourced.
Future workforce – volunteers and leaders
Our latest State of Volunteering Report – with insights from over 1500 volunteers and 400 organisations – tells us more about volunteers and their changing needs.
It identifies a trend for more casual volunteering – a quarter of people are giving up to 5 hours a month, while only 7% are volunteering over 20 hours. Barriers for volunteers include the rising cost of living, lack of time and needing to work more, and concerns about health and safety. The motivation for volunteering however remains the same – people are volunteering to enrich communities and for the social connections.
We did a nationwide survey of Volunteer Managers in 2022: Thirty-seven percent of respondents received no training for managing volunteers over the previous year with a further 27 % receiving minimal training.
We also know that volunteer managers are often new in their role, that they learn on the job, and are not professionally trained. They need access to peers, and access to support/data in timely manner.
Over the previous year we have run peer and mentoring programmes with 120 volunteer managers and leaders, providing much-needed coaching and support.
The future – tech and tools
Our research showed that those organisations who had a volunteer management system fared much better during the Covid pandemic than those without.
While we are a sector with an incredible amount of human and emotional capacity, it makes sense to invest in technology capacity. Especially as many of the new tech and tools are available for free or low-cost to for-purpose organisations.
At our Volunteering Hui in Christchurch in September, the role of AI in volunteer management was our most popular session. Our AI expert urged us to be agile, willing to change and try new things, and upskill in AI literacy. An organisational manager gave an example of trialling an AI Chatbot to help her with tasks like writing social media posts. While there are risks and ethical concerns, developing good policies and protocols around their use will mitigate these.
Conclusion
As a volunteer manager myself I know how all-consuming the job is. It is important to lift your head up from the day-to-day busyness and consider a bigger picture. Take some time to invest in your own development to make your role more effective and more enjoyable. Put some stepping stones in place towards a future normal, hopefully a more supported, resourced normality.
