Steve McCurley

Steve McCurley first got involved in volunteer management in 1976. He was working in Chicago, it was February, it was 5 degrees out and had been snowing for a week. He got a call from a friend who had been hired by the National Center for Voluntary Action (NCVA) to run a grant project for the Bicentennial and needed some help. The fact that the temperature in Washington, DC was only 40 degrees proved to be a major incentive to make the move! 

For the next 10 years, McCurley worked for the various iterations of NCVA, at some point becoming responsible for the network of Volunteers Centers throughout the country. In this role he spent a lot of time working with organizations to help them find better ways to get volunteers involved in their communities. It quickly became obvious that the biggest barrier to accomplishing this was the lack of capacity in most nonprofit agencies to effectively involve volunteers – which motivated McCurley to start writing and training on Volunteer Management. In 1986, he began his own consulting company and steadily became an internationally-known speaker in the field. 

One of McCurley’s unique contributions was being part of the “invasion of the United Kingdom,” which started in the late 1990s and continued until about 2010. Several US consultants on volunteer management (Susan J. Ellis, Rick Lynch, Arlene Schindler, Steve McCurley) were invited by Dame Elisabeth Hoodless of Community Service Volunteers (CSV) to do training for UK nonprofits and government agencies. It is no exaggeration to say that this initiative quickly changed the nation’s entire approach to Volunteer Management in a remarkably short time, moving them about 30 years ahead in terms of technique and philosophy. The ripple effects of this initiative is still visible today. And despite dealing with severe cutbacks in government funding, volunteering in the UK remains in the forefront of experimentation and innovation in the world.

During his long career, McCurley conducted hundreds of workshops and seminars – characterized by his no nonsense, practical content delivered with plenty of dry humor. He consulted with a wide range of organizations, including American Association of Retired Persons, the US Tennis Association, Special Olympics International, the National Park Service and the Points of Light Foundation. Unlike many consultants, he often developed long relationships with his clients and witnessed the impact of his work over time. He was a partner in VM Systems, a joint effort with Sue Vineyard, which published several popular resources for practitioners. In collaboration with Ellis, he co-founded and co-edited e-Volunteerism: The Electronic Journal of the Volunteer Community, which provided 20 years of cutting-edge thought leadership and ultimately evolved into Engage in 2020. McCurley is the author of 14 books and more than 120 articles on Volunteer Engagement, including the best-selling basic guide, Volunteer Management:  Mobilizing All the Resources of the Community, 3rd Edition. On the international front ,he worked in Canada, Australia, England, the Caribbean and South America. His writings have been translated in numerous languages, including Spanish, Portuguese, Russian, Ukrainian, Hebrew, Chinese and Korean.

In his words (after retirement):

"Despite all the challenges, my conclusion after 50 years is that it was quite enjoyable, partially because I’ve always found the idea of helping people work for free to be a very intellectually demanding management notion, but mostly because of all the interesting people that I got to work with. Working with people who love and value what they do is a much better thing than simply working at a job you hate in order to make enough money to retire as quickly as you can.”