Yellowfire Press

by Ivan Scheier

@ -- permission for use-with-acknowledgment

CHAPTER TWO

The Case for People Approach, and Some Cautions @

."People Approach attitudes are at work anytime an imaginative leader of volunteers creates a needed job around the motivations and abilities a person or group brings to a situation, or anytime a sensitive interviewer of prospective volunteers listens to their hopes, concerns, interests, rather than telling them what they ought to want to do. These relatively unselfconscious applications of People Approach are warmly applauded here. But the main agenda has been development of self-conscious, systematic methods and strategies derived rigorously from the People Approach Principle. . . " MINI-MAX" and "Need-Overlap Analysis in Helping (NOAH)"

For contributions to Handbook contents, thanks to Jerry Bagg, Judy Wilkinson, and Sue Dryovage for internal review; to Miriam Gingras for manuscript preparation and editing.

Benefits in Recruitment of Volunteers
Consider the volunteer recruiting crunch most of us suffer today. Throughout North America, informal but powerfully confirmed impressions pile up: while the number of people volunteering may have increased slightly during the past decade, the number of organizations competing for volunteers has multiplied five-fold to sevenfold during the same period, and may shoot up even more rapidly in these budget-shrunk times. It is scant comfort to reflect that we may be victims of our own success in popularizing volunteerism as a respectable, effective way of getting helping work done; for most of us today, good volunteers are harder to find than they ever were. Many individual programs and organizations have been declining in total number of volunteers for several years or more.

Overall, I do not think we can any longer afford to be satisfied with only 20-30% of Americans as volunteers, in an era where social problems seem to demand 100% participation. Grateful as we should be to the one in four who are involved today, we must begin soon and seriously to increase the total pool of volunteers towards a target far closer to four out of four people.

To do this, we must be much more careful and self-conscious in first orienting towards what people want to do, and then imaginatively relating this to our needs for help. This is exactly what People Approach does and – please note – the dividend is not only more volunteers, but a greater variety of volunteer backgrounds and experience. (1)

Insofar as we are willing and able to let people do it their way, I don’t believe there is such a thing as an apathetic person, among the three out of four Americans who don’t volunteer, or anywhere else. What we do have is some unimaginative leaders who have failed to get across to people how they can often help other people and enjoy themselves at the same time.

Benefits From a Program Investment Standpoint
Another people approach benefit pertains to the time, skill, and money we commit to the development and maintenance of volunteer enterprises. This investment should never be neglected or wantonly slashed; anyone who thinks volunteer programs are something for nothing is likely to end up getting nothing for nothing.

But at the same time we can paint ourselves into a corner where our investment in a volunteer program or organization is simply more than we can afford. For the past five years, I’ve been seeing more and more frequent evidence that it costs $500-1,000 a year for some sophisticated volunteer programs to field a single volunteer.(2) (I’m aware that some other programs do it for far less.) In terms of return from the typical volunteer in market value and human value of work, $1,000 has to be the bargain of the century. But in terms of what many of us actually can afford these days, it is also becoming an impossible amount if we wish to keep significant numbers of volunteers involved.

People Approach can help here. When we involve people doing what they are already motivated and competent to do, we can budget less time and money motivating, supervising, and training these "naturals." Even without sophisticated (and costly) incentives and supervision, a volunteer doing work closer to her/his heart, mind and hands is more likely to preserve self-directedly until work purposes are achieved. Put otherwise, People Approach methods can increase the number of productively and happily engaged volunteers per volunteer coordinator or other volunteer leader. Among other things, this should make the volunteer coordinator’s job more significant and valued.

Issues
People Approach is essentially a search for ways in which more helping can occur, out of a faith that everyone has something to give, if only we are skilled enough to identify it, and imaginative enough to connect it to real need. Not incidentally, part of the positive prospect here is to move more strongly with the best aspirations of our society – to include people rather than exclude them.

But this doesn’t mean that anything anybody happens to feel like doing will be helpful to others, e.g., using dope or cheating at cards. At a minimum, the offering must be legal and ethical. Beyond that, what we will call a "Glad Give" can’t be just anything a person likes to do and can do pretty well. It must also be something which might be useful to other people.

This point will be elaborated later in this handbook. Suffice it to stress here that People Approach is not license to "do your own thing," whatever it may be, and call it helping. Confusion in this area might be the result of a People Approach position on the enjoyability of helping. When people are simply doing what they like to do, helping can indeed be fun, interesting, even joyful. This position probably bothers people who, unconsciously at least, believe that the integrity of help somehow depends on it being a kind of sacrifice.

People Approach says it doesn’t have to hurt before it helps. A great deal of helping can occur when we move with what is already moving in people, before we reach the "obligation barrier:" the things nobody (in sight) wants to do. That point will surely come, where we must rely on conscience, a sense of obligation, and even sacrifice. People Approach simply goes as far as possible with the good that is in people now, however hidden it may be from ordinary view, before having to tap into precious reserves of pure conscience

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(1) For more on recruiting, see: Recruiting Volunteers in the 1980’s: A Perspective on People Approach by Ivan Scheier, pages 7-8, in the Winter, 1981 edition of The NAVCJ Examiner, published by the National Association of Volunteers in Criminal Justice, University Alabama, 35486

(2) See references on page 7 of A Look at the Eighties; Crucial Environmental Factors Affecting Volunteerism. The National Forum on Volunteerism, 1980. These references suggest that the direct and indirect cost of putting a volunteer in the field in organized, supervised agency-related volunteer programs, is currently #1.25-$1.50 an hour. Volunteers working 350-700 hours a year would then give the $500-$1,000 total yearly cost figures. I’ve also seen that total figure directly costed out in confidential reports.