The New Volunteerism Project
The Archival
Collection of
Ivan Henry Scheier
Ivan's Musings
Relapse Into Volunteerism:
An Unsuccessful Attempt to Resign From the Field
Permission to re-post this
article was approved by
e-Volunteerism: The Electronic Journal of
the Volunteerism Community
Vol I, Issue 2, Winter 2001
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the publisher for re-publication
By: Ivan H. Scheier
Research years ago showed a very high turnover rate among Coordinators of Volunteers -- the figure I remember is one out of three leaving the field every two or three years (though often staying in the same organization). It was a substantial percentage, anyhow, and I expect it still is.
Four or five years ago, I became part of that statistic -- though after thirty-five rather than three years in our fulfilling and fascinating field. Learning of my retirement from organized volunteerism, a friend and colleague, whose initials are Susan Ellis, observed:
You can't retire from volunteerism (that is, it isn’t possible) because you can take a person out of volunteerism, but you can’t take volunteerism out of a person.' Just watch me, says I, (silently but sincerely).
My new post-volunteerism career was as proprietor of a retreat and healing center in Southern New Mexico. The main, though not exclusive, emphasis there was on holistic healing; for example, meditation, acupressure, gardening as a spiritual enterprise, T'ai Chi, lots of quiet time for reflection, and Reiki. There are an estimated two million Reiki Practitioners in the world. Incidentally, quite a few of these Practitioners also happen to be Coordinators/Directors of Volunteers, and quite a few more volunteerism colleagues have experienced Reiki as clients or receiving partners
Reiki can be defined as a hands-on stress relaxation technique. That should be enough recommendation in this day and age, though some research and anecdotal experience suggests Reiki has far more extensive healing potential. Reiki is also something ordinary people can learn (I've never met anyone who couldn't) and requires no expensive equipment.
Impressed, I took a course of study and practice which enabled me not only to practice Reiki, but also to train and certify others as Reiki Practitioners. (Training of Trainers?) In Sierra County, where I live, there are now eighty-five Reiki Practitioners, most of them trained by me. They constitute almost 1% of the population of this largely rural county. After the fact, and maybe somewhat optimistically, this has been dubbed a saturation effect.
In the parallel case of meditation, it has been proposed that as many as 1% of a population engaged in such a healing activity will not only benefit those directly impacted, but also the neighborhood or community as a whole, e.g., in such things as crime rate, accident rate and other quality of life indices.
There has even been some research confirming this for meditation. For Reiki, we shall see... But there is no doubt these eighty-five Practitioners are directly benefiting the friends, families, and sometimes strangers, too, to whom they give treatments.
So far as I am aware, none of these Practitioners charges for giving Reiki treatments; living here, I'd probably know if they did. Moreover, I don't charge for training them to be Practitioners (though three of the eighty-five occasionally do if they train others). In other words, we are all -- what's that word? -- volunteers, though I never hear the term used in connection with Reiki. But still, I was more or less responsible for recruiting most of these volunteers, or at least actively responding to their interest. I also trained them. I also sometimes have to relate to people who don 't believe anything is worthwhile unless they pay for it. Also, other people would like to charge for giving Reiki treatments and somewhat resent our doing so without charge.
Eerily familiar? Have I been inadvertently reincarnated as a Volunteer Coordinator? The recruiting and training of volunteers makes this a plausible deja vu. On the other hand, I don 't supervise these volunteers in any real sense, nor does anyone else that I know of. Nor do I assign them beyond general encouragement such as: Go forth and do good with Reiki. There's a lot of trust here in the volunteer Practitioners' good judgment on who they will work with, where and how, within the Reiki framework.
The siting of the volunteer work is another big difference from traditional agency-based volunteer programs. The Reiki Saturation Project (getting now into grant application terminology) does not prepare and site its volunteer Practitioners for work in a single agency or organization. Instead, the project sends them out into an entire community or neighborhood with, again, complete or nearly complete confidence in the volunteer's judgment and ability to function effectively in such a wide arena.
Maybe we could call the role Community Volunteer Coordinator, though it is more catalyst than coordinator, more supplier than supervisor of volunteers. There are surely many more kinds of volunteers besides Reiki Practitioners that could be supplied. The example of meditators has already been mentioned, and in a book some years ago, I described and identified a few examples of a role I called neighborhood enabler, for establishing, identifying and/or strengthening positive networks in a neighborhood or community. Possibly an evangelical church, sending its people out to spread the good word, is another example. Cooperative Extension also seems to involve some pretty close fits to this model -- maybe that's why I've always admired them so much.
Finally, I don't see why our Community Volunteer Catalyst or Supplier need undergo financial martyrdom. I see a future in which such a person could be hired by local governments, neighborhoods, even builders and promoters of housing developments and shopping centers.
In any case, I have indeed been unable to resign from volunteerism.
And neither can you. In fact, someday you might find that the volunteerism described above, which may seem unrelated to what you do now, is in fact much more closely related to your career goals and aspirations in a wider view of volunteerism and what we can do to facilitate it. Because, it's all part of the same extended family.
Ivan Scheier
Stillpoint
607 Marr
Truth or Consequences, New Mexico, 87901
Tel (505) 894-1340
Email: ivan@zianet.comFor comments and editing suggestions please contact Mary Lou McNatt mlmcnatt@indra.com
