The New Volunteerism Project
The Archival
Collection of
Ivan Henry Scheier
Ivan's
Musings
The Self-Employed Volunteer
by Ivan Scheier
Permission to re-post this
article was approved by
e-Volunteerism: The Electronic Journal of
the Volunteerism Community
Vol II, Issue 1, Oct-Dec 2001
-- Appropriate permission must be secured from
the publisher for re-publication
Is there a big blind spot in volunteer management? Consider:
* the elderly gentleman in the park, feeding pigeons or even squirrels
* a woman regularly looking in on a sick neighbor
* a teenager teaching other young people how to skateboard
* the police officer (definitely not as part of his official job) finding time to stop for a friendly chat with a troubled young person
* the helpful giver of directions to confused tourists
...and a whole host of other such “natural helpers” and doers of daily decencies, enriching virtually every neighborhood. To all these I would add the Dreamers who “go for it” to achieve their personal vision or goal. Often they are not paid for trying, just as often the goal itself is not defined primarily or at all in financial terms. So Dreamers, too, are often volunteers, though they rarely think of themselves in such terms. Moreover, my experience is that most of their goals have direct or indirect positive social implications. Even where the goals seem primarily to serve the Dreamer personally, I would argue that a happy society can be seen in many ways as the sum of fulfilled individuals.
People in the above examples could be thought of as "self-employed volunteers" in the sense that their helping behavior is not just unpaid, but is also primarily "on their own": freely chosen and accomplished, without benefit of bosses, managers, supervisors, rules or regulations, and typically without significant organizational support. There is always accountability, or should be. But for the self-employed volunteer, this accountability is virtually entirely to the client or goal served, not to any boss or agency.
As in our traditional notion of paid employment, it seems to me that organized volunteerism has been mainly concerned with the volunteers who work for an organization, boss or supervisor (often more than one), and in accordance with rules. This is especially clear in highly-structured, hierarchical organizations such as hospitals, prisons, law enforcement, schools, and the military. What such organizations have in common is that, whatever euphemism may be used, they need to control the work of their employees so that, essentially, their people do what the organization wants them to do - which also means not do what the organization does not want them to do. “Loose cannons” need not apply. This is in sharp contrast to community organizing, in which we are challenged to find out what people want to do and then help them do it.
Organized volunteerism has a unique and exquisite challenge: how to control the work of volunteers when, unlike in paid employment, the primary teeth in compliance have been pulled. That is, you can‘t withhold volunteers‘ pay, or threaten to, nor can you in any other clear way insist they observe the orders of those in authority “or else.” To be sure, you can always fire volunteers (it isn‘t always easy, though) or they can quit before you fire them. In either case, however, they won‘t be doing what you wanted them to do.
Thus, I believe virtually all of volunteer management can be viewed as an attempt to get around the huge difficulty of controlling the work of “unpaid employees” without the use of money or command. Strategies for this include targeted volunteer recruitment, volunteer screening/selection, job descriptions, orientation and training, evaluation, volunteer supervision, of course, and even recognition. (You get that plaque not only for a thousand hours but also because you never gave in to the impulse to roller skate in the reception area.) Much or most of this control/accountability is necessary, especially if you are talking about volunteers in an agency or organization. Moreover, there are many volunteers who welcome and value such guidance and structure in their work.
But there are other volunteers - many of them, I think - who take seriously the notion that volunteering is the one place in a lifetime of obliged work where they can choose their caring work and how it shall be done. In other words, they see volunteering as a rare opportunity for self-determined work, which is to say, work that is not “managed.” Indeed, in her very last publication, Harriet Naylor, considered by many to be the founder of organized volunteerism (see Voices from the Past in Vol. I, Issue 1), wondered in her gentle way if volunteers get involved in order to be managed. It sometimes seems strange to me that management, as a main strategy for dealing with volunteers, tends to take away the very choicefulness that the word “volunteer” means. To be sure, this is usually done quite gently, subtly and with the best intentions. But, in this sense, “volunteer management” is an oxymoron! Moreover, it may be that the better we get at controlling/guiding the work of volunteers, the more choice-motivated volunteers we turn off. They may stop volunteering completely or perhaps instead turn to self-employed volunteering.
I think self-employed volunteers can contribute as much to caring communities as the equally wonderful and more visible “managed” volunteers which are our main concern now in “agency volunteer programs.“ (And I honestly think we can learn to get along without the volunteer/staff problem, too!)
So this is an appeal for organized volunteerism to broaden its compass to include self-employed volunteers. Though I hope and expect this will happen someday, I am not holding my breath while waiting. One good reason may be people’s reluctance to “mess with” the “naturally” good thing which much of self-employed volunteering is. An analogy would be to prefer simple hands-off appreciation of a beautiful wilderness area over investing the land with paths, roads, tourist shops, and oil derricks.
But even when the urge to interfere is mightily persuasive, the problem may be how to interfere. So far as I am aware, there is no developed, articulated methodology for non-hierarchical support of individuals or groups who desire freedom to choose what work they will do and how they will do it. Such a “horizontal” methodology would, I think, parallel management for situations in which there are bosses and accountability to them and/or to an organization.
http://e-volunteerism.com/img/joinin.gif
Suggested Horizontal Methods
Here are some first suggestions from work I’ve done for providing non-hierarchical support to self-employed volunteers. These are greatly in need of critique, integration and addition, so please press the response button and share your ideas. Still, even in their present relatively-undeveloped form, these suggestions offer a basis of operation for a professional person of the future whose role is to support the work of self-employed volunteers, and whose own work might be supported by a neighborhood, village, city, United Way, foundation, or the like.
The following methods, or proto-methods seem to have a few things in common:
They trust and respect volunteers enough to allow them to set their own goals.
Further, they trust self-employed volunteers with a large measure of choice in the people with whom they will work in seeking their goals.
The strategies themselves are intrinsically voluntary; that is, they maximize the extent to which volunteers choose what they will do and when, while minimizing the extent to which volunteer work is directed or controlled by “higher-ups.”
Method #1: Networking
Networking is a “horizontal” (vs. “vertical”) means of supporting the work of self-employed volunteers, essentially by facilitating voluntary win-win exchange of materials, information, and ideas, between individuals or groups who choose to be involved in the network. Ordinarily, the self-employed volunteer would be free to choose the network most compatible with her or his goals and, within that network, the information, ideas and material resources most relevant to his or her goal’s achievement
One example of networking would be a volunteer forming and/or participating in a self-help group of, say, single mothers, for mutual advantage among members. Another would be taking on the role of introducing people or groups to one another when there is the clear potential they can help one another in professional or business ways, or just be friends. I think of a case where a volunteer matched a lonely retired auto mechanic with a troubled young boy who seemed to have no healthy interests besides working on cars.
Ideas for how to initiate or trigger networks are in Chapter 7 of my book When Everyone’s a Volunteer (Energize, 1992), http://www.energizeinc.com/total/whe.html The same book describes two processes by which different individuals can plan and/or cooperate voluntarily on projects, without any one person “supervising” or, in the strict sense, managing another. These are the Membership Input Process for setting goals (Chapter 2) and the Work Assignment Grid (Chapter 3). The Work Assignment Grid, for example, is a process through which a total project can get done, usually more effectively, when each person/volunteer is allowed freely to choose the task(s) which they like most and do best.
Method #2: Dreaming
As noted earlier, I believe most Dreamers, most of the time, are self-employed volunteers - where dreams are understood as goals, visions, or yearnings for something better. In my recent book, Making Dreams Come True without Money, Might, or Miracles ( Energize, 2000 http://www.energizeinc.com/total/makd.html ), I present a first set of principles designed to help people achieve their dreams. A theme was the overcoming of dream-unfriendly blockages in the person ‘s problem-solving style, in the environment, and in the culture.
Throughout my years as a self-appointed Dream-Catcher, many individuals have shared their aspirations, goals and hopes with me. Some of these dreams have a very concrete form while others are still evolving, and appear rather vague or general. Examples of these dreams include:
* To educate people about the value and feasibility of alternative means of creating affordable housing (such as straw bale houses);
* To rejuvenate an isolated Hispanic community whose young people currently have to leave in order to find work;
* To create a community center in a village almost totally without financial or other resources;
* To create a market in America for the work of Romanian artists (so that the artists do not feel that they need to emigrate and thus deprive their own country of their talent).
* To get an advanced degree in dance therapy so as to become more effective in working with troubled teenagers.
Nothing happens unless someone can first envision it…and then takes the first steps.
Method #3: Lurking
“Lurking” unobtrusively observes and identifies the selected good actions of self-employed volunteers, and then rewards the volunteers. The “good deeds” of Boy Scouts could be a partial example. The Scoutmaster presumably doesn‘t tell the boys exactly what to do or when (beyond general encouragement to do something decent) and the same Scoutmaster may have no more than a general awareness of what any boy actually does. The boy‘s reported good deeds are then rewarded in some fashion, at least with adult and peer approval, and maybe also as a milestone contributing to advancement in level of Scouting.
Here’s an example closer to what I mean. Some years ago in Kingston, Ontario, I noticed packets of cards accessible all over town. These cards enabled anyone - resident or visitor - to note a courteous, helpful or kindly act by anyone else in town, e.g., a clerk or server in a business establishment, a teacher, a police officer, a receptionist, a neighbor, or any stranger on the street (call these “self-employed volunteers,” though I’m sure they never thought of themselves this way). These cards could then be put in one of a number of “ballot boxes” around town. At the end of the year, the ballots were counted and the person with the most “votes” received a free trip to Bermuda, I believe - no small thing in a brisk Canadian January. There were runner-up prizes, too.
I’m not sure how the program handled good Samaritans who did not want to be identified. I hope requests for anonymity were honored, although I’m also sure a careful study of time, place and occasion could often reveal the identity of the good-doer. Cynic that I am, I also suppose there could be occasional ballot-box stuffing, but mostly I doubt that as a major factor. Finally, please note that there was no complaint checkoff or request on these cards (the annual winner of which would presumably have received a free ticket to the North Pole). The absence of the critique option is unlike most comment cards you see around businesses and communities today.
I believe that lurking-of-the-positive-kind has real possibilities for further development. But obviously some bugs have to be worked out. For example, hoping to give police officers more chance to be friendly and appreciated, a large city some years ago gave traffic officers a supply of free tickets to home games of the local major league baseball team. These were to be given to people seen driving with exemplary care and skill (assuming they liked baseball or had a friend who did). Early in the program, one officer observed such a driver and started to pull him over to give him this other kind of (good) ticket. Whereupon, seeing the flashing lights, the driver panicked and went through a stop sign. My information on the incident ends at this point, but possibly the traffic officer gave the driver both kinds of tickets. (I really hope not.) Perhaps the next time the flashing lights could be replaced with a friendly thank-you greeting on the police car’s loudspeaker, with soothing musical accompaniment!
Method #4: Benign Infiltration
By definition, self-employed volunteers are likely to be resistive (at least in their volunteer life) to working under orders, strict rules and the like. But they might still value tools to help achieve their goals - physical resources, relevant information, or ideas. One way of providing support would be to offer prospective or current self-employed volunteers some training designed to enhance their effectiveness in the general kind of involvement they have chosen. Their participation in the training would be entirely voluntary, of course and, within broad limits, so would be how they applied the training.
As I explained in my article in Volume I, Issue 2 , I have been conducting such a program for the past five years, from a holistic healing and retreat center called STILLPOINT, in southern New Mexico. STILLPOINT is an entirely volunteer operation and my benign infiltration “program” is based on Reiki, a holistically- oriented stress relaxation technique which, I believe, virtually anyone can learn. As a Traditional Reiki Master, I have been prepared and authorized to train and “certify” other people as Reiki Practitioners, which I have done entirely as a self-employed volunteer - no fees charged. I have urged all my trainees to “pass it on” similarly as a gift to others and, so far as I am aware, all but two or three of the 100 or so people I have trained have done so (though sometimes they “trade “for their services). So these trainees, too, are self-employed volunteers, free to use the Reiki training provided at no cost to them, in order to enhance their healing role.
As for infiltration, our goal was that at least 1% of the total population of Sierra County, NM, where I live, would become Reiki Practitioners. Summing the people I trained, those trained by others, and those who were already Reiki Practitioners, this 1% level was reached and exceeded about a year ago in Sierra County. The 1% criterion is not as important as the basic concept of providing training to enable self-employed volunteers to do more effectively what they want to do.
To the horror of any program evaluator (I know because I used to be one), there is no way - at least no easy way - in which we can rigorously register and evaluate exactly what effects these 100-plus people “turned loose” on Sierra County are having. This, in addition to our allowing people to choose their own goals, is just one more way in which our approach to self-employed volunteers fundamentally involves trusting them. Oh, sure, I get plenty of feedback on what our “loose cannons” are doing in our small town, and there are Clinics and get-togethers at which we can talk things over and get a feel for what is going on. But once I trained the practitioners I did not go on to supervise or manage them - nor did anyone else that I know of. So that was the end of our “evaluation.” (Continuation of grant is not requested because there was never one in the first place.)
Potential for Our Field
I hope it is clear that any of the above four processes can be facilitated by a skilled person, which is a role that I hope more volunteer program managers will relish. It may be possible consciously to attract self-employed volunteers in support of formal organizations, if there is a willingness to allow these volunteers more freedom of action than is otherwise granted to “managed” volunteers.
However, I don't think the person who works primarily with self-employed volunteers is likely to be called a "volunteer coordinator," and certainly not a "director" of volunteers. I hope we can avoid conceptualizing the self-employed concept as simply another challenge of bringing more people into the same established system of dealing with volunteers, as in getting more minority people to "do it our way." Instead, think of the churches that have been more successful in attracting former out-groups such as, say, Native Americans. Essentially, in order to convert the "heathens" they converted the church, in the sense of accommodating it, as possible, to the established spiritual practices of the people they sought to attract. In the same way, with the methods and concepts described in this article, I am seeking a volunteerism which can modify itself to attract a vast "new" constituency: the self-employed volunteer. Similar to the missionary who adapted church practice and doctrine to attract diverse people, I think of the community psychologist who, in my day at least, took psychology out of the consulting room and onto the streets. It had to be a somewhat different kind of psychology, I think.
Finally, it is no accident, now that I think of it, that I have always been most interested in those areas of volunteerism where sheer scope of operation or rights of the volunteers themselves, made it necessary or at least easier to trust volunteers. The Bureau of Land Management, for example, with territories as big as small states could not possibly intensively "supervise" volunteers planting trees or fixing trails in such vast territories. Co-op Extension couldn't possibly supervise in any strict sense, all the 4-H club leaders. As for volunteers working in their own neighborhoods, this is real self-help. It clearly would be a problem for someone to come in and tell these volunteers what is best for their own neighborhood - at least insofar as the "supervisor" is not from that neighborhood personally.
In today’s risk management climate, some readers may be wondering whether such lack of monitoring of self-employed volunteers might do harm to a client. In the first place I don't think we're dealing with “clients” here in any strict sense, meaning people for which the agency/ person is legally responsible. The volunteer working in a typical agency program has two "directions" of responsibility - to the agency and to the person(s) served (they overlap, of course). But the self-employed volunteer has only the latter direction of responsibility because, in purest form, self-employed volunteering has no organization to be accountable to. The “people served” by self-employed volunteers are not legally their responsibility. The people served are entirely voluntary in their participation and can end it at any time. And they do not pay for the services.
Naturally, the degree of risk might depend on the subject area. If I'm teaching marksmanship, say, or how to mix drinks, there might be a case to hold me responsible for misuse of my information by my students. But if I'm teaching gardening or housepainting in hopes that the self-employed volunteers will use it to beautify their homes and other homes in their neighborhood and community, I don't see that I can be held legally responsible for any conceivable misuse, e.g., the student uses housepaint to vandalize public property. Later this month I'm doing a workshop on my group exercise, the Support Circle, in town here. I fully expect the process will then be used positively in virtually every instance, but if it is not (such as, how to drive ethnic group X out of our neighborhood), I don't think I am ethically or legally responsible. Say the same for any workshop I have ever taught and, for that matter, anything ever published, including any article in e-Volunteerism. Would any teacher in any school dare open her or his mouth? Indeed, though we should be aware of risk in all that we do, a slavish fear will suppress any attempt to do anything good.
I’m going to be honest. The audience for this “Musing” is not the usual director of volunteer services who is, as perhaps forty years ago, legitimately concerned simply with getting more good volunteers and more cooperation from staff. My increasing frustration and grief concerning our field is that, from among these “practical” colleagues, maybe 5% have enough of a more "abstract" interest in the future of our field to be interested in what I have to say. Otherwise, I want to speak to consultants and trainers in the field, and top leaders who, as part of their leadership help people to think about brighter, larger futures for the field and for themselves in it.
In all this, I have simply been trying to envision and begin to flesh out a way in which the field of volunteerism can become more inclusive, the rank-and-file professional leadership more diversified and, I believe ultimately, evolve into an even more important and broader role. To this end, my "musings" are presented mainly as stimuli and challenges for subscriber response and dialogue, rather than as a finished product - I hardly ever present the latter anyhow.
------------
Those interested in further relevant readings might wish to check out the archives of my publications at Regis University in Denver. This material is also on the following web site: http://academic.regis.edu/volunteer/ivan See especially Section VII.
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
