Rick Lynch

After earning a BA degree in writing and a Master’s degree in “History of Ideas,” Rick Lynch’s introduction to volunteerism began in 1969 when he joined the federal VISTA (Volunteers In Service To America) program. During his year of national service, Lynch worked as volunteer coordinator for the Huntsville-Madison County Community Action Agency. Recognizing his talents as a presenter, he was then hired as a VISTA trainer and ultimately became Training Officer for the Washington State Office of Voluntary Action.

In 1979, Lynch started his own consulting business with the mission of helping managers develop productive workplaces. Through training and coaching, he focused on enabling leaders to tap the best efforts of the people they lead. In 1985, he authored Precision Management: How to Build and Manage the Winning Organization, positioning him as a top seminar speaker by businesses and government.

Although many of his clients were in the public and corporate sectors, Lynch instinctively understood that Leaders of Volunteers in nonprofit organizations could also benefit from similar management training. During the 1980s and 1990s, he quickly became known for his ability to help them discover practical actions to make themselves and their organizations immediately more effective. His entertaining and dynamic style made him a favorite speaker at volunteerism conferences across North America.

In 1989, Lynch partnered with peers Steve McCurley and Sue Vineyard to publish Essentials of Volunteer Management, a basic, comprehensive primer on best practices. During the next several decades, this book has been updated under the title Volunteer Management: Mobilizing All the Resources of the Community; it is still a highly recommended resource for those who are new to the field.

In the mid-1990s, Lynch helped design the Institute for Advanced Volunteer Management (IAVM), a new effort to bring the knowledge of international experts to volunteer managers in the UK. Over the next 15 years, IAVM brought leading trainers from the US and Canada to share cutting-edge practices and insights. While the audience was largely British, there were occasionally practitioners from other European and African countries as well.

Lynch’s ability to combine his management experience with the spirit of volunteer service made him a unique pioneer. The overarching themes of his philosophy were:

• Volunteers should be thought of and treated as donors. They donate time not money;
• Volunteers can do a lot more than useful support services. They can play meaningful, mission-critical roles;
• Volunteering is a leisure-time activity and needs to provide the same motivational satisfaction as other leisure-time activities; and
• Recruiting is a process of showing people they can do what they already want to do.

Thanks to his hundreds of workshops and coaching insights, these principles have proven the test of time and are still foundational to effective practice today.