Leaders of Volunteers - You Are Not Alone!
If I can have just one message understood by ALL of my peers around the world, it is:
You are not alone! You have a full community of peers, resources, and answers at your service.
Time and time again - as a mentor and mentee, presenter, trainer, colleague, friend – I’ve heard leaders of volunteers express the pure joy and relief of finding their people and peers, often after struggling for months or years in their new profession feeling isolated, unheard, and under-valued by their organization.
Data from VolunteerPro’s annual survey of volunteer services professionals demonstrates a concerning pattern; there is a drastic drop-out rate for this career around 5 years into it. Leaders of volunteers who make it to double digits (10 years) and beyond, tend to remain committed to their career path, or at that point are advancing by “leaving” the job of Volunteer Administrator in achieving executive positions.
This begs the questions:
Why, where, and who are the “lost leaders” in that mid-career range, 6 to 9 years? More importantly, how can we as a profession support new leaders of volunteers to not fall off that 5 -year cliff?
VolunteerMatch, Volunteer Commons (Dr. Sue Carter-Kahl), VolunteerPro (Tobi Johnson), and other researchers have a few formal answers to explain the significant loss and brain-drain, with some very unsurprising answers for the WHY:
1. Burnout
2. Low-pay
3. Jumping to other jobs because of #1 and #2
All three reasons align with the unfortunately too common, multi-sector misconception that designing and supervising volunteer programs and activities isn’t a “real” job and career. All three reasons which make sense when there are very few academic study-tracks or majors supporting the skills necessary to successfully lead, engage, and manage volunteer teams.
The WHO are most likely to be young AmeriCorps alum, frustrated and disillusioned, tired of starvation-wage stipends, or mid-career workers who get thrown into the deep end of the volunteer administration pool against their will, and it was just never fun or the right fit. Too often a new Volunteer Coordinator is minted not so much with an invitation to engage and inspire people, but an order to take on an unwelcome task, along the lines of:
“Here’s another hat for you as a Development Associate – get 50 gala volunteers by tomorrow!”
“We’re giving you the role to develop the CSR program – with no additional headcount (i.e., a department of one).”
“The foundation is sending over a group of donors to volunteer – give them something fun to do next week.”
It’s no wonder then, that the WHERE our colleagues go after a few years, is anywhere but here! Taking their time as a leader of volunteers at best as a stepping stone to “better things”, and at worst, with a bitter taste of burned bridges and horror stories that taint their dealings with volunteer services for years to come.
There’s a joke in the volunteer engagement sector that no little kid sits around day-dreaming about someday growing up to create volunteer programs, policies, and procedures; but why not? It IS a real career that is social, analytical, creative, challenging, fun, fulfilling, and vitally important to a well-functioning civic society.
The most important thing to remember in our work as leaders of volunteers, and what keeps us going through thick and thin, is that we are a community of passionate inspirers.
What we can, and are doing, as leaders of volunteers at every point in our careers is to model and motivate the community, and the next generations of leaders, change-makers, and challengers of the status-quo. We have each other’s backs, through good times and bad, with global, national, and local professional networks such as the Council for Certification in Volunteer Administration (CCVA), International Association for Volunteer Effort (IAVE), Association of Leaders in Volunteer Engagement (AL!VE/USA), Volunteer Management Professionals of Canada (VMPC), Association of Volunteer Managers (UK), and thousands of city and state DOVIAS(Directors of Volunteers in Agencies).
Offering our support to our newest peers as mentors, cheerleaders, and advocates is personal and political. The work of entities like the Points of Light and The National Alliance for Volunteer Engagement (www.all4engagement.org), collaborating as they do with the above mentioned professional networks, is as vital to amplifying the conversation for the priceless value of volunteering as are the individual chats with colleagues as they decide:
Is this my path? YES!