From day one, I said to her that “it’s not that I don’t want you to be privy to things, it’s that I don’t want you to be burdened with junk. You’re here to do good work and you deserve to be shielded from the nonsense.”
Nurturing resilience is a gift to your future self. It doesn’t matter if change is upheaval or small, it upsets the status quo and we can nurture a “change is not the end of the world” mindset, so that when changes occur, volunteers are prepared to work through them.
Because volunteer resilience is key to not only surviving major disruptions, but key to surviving and thriving during more minor disruptions, we are knee-deep in encouraging resilience. Nurturing volunteer resilience is necessary, regardless of a pandemic or a change in policy.
Are volunteers resilient? How about volunteer mangers? How filled up is your cope-o-meter right now? In this VPT podcast, Laura Rundell chats resilience.
We invest in people. But we don’t often measure our investment’s growth. We’re too overwhelmed with daily work to stop and take stock of our positive influence on volunteers and our missions.
We have to stop the misconception that volunteers are possessions, and until we throw them out, they will keep coming back up to the moment they wear out or die. Instead, let’s speak of volunteers as temporary from the start. They are with us for the time that benefits us and them, not forever or until we dump them. Let’s speak about the privilege to have them for one event, one week, one season or one year. Never forever.
Recently, (like 2 weeks ago) I had the opportunity to chat with Brittany McGarry, a volunteer engagement specialist at the …
Experiential learning teaches us to apply knowledge from doing. It forces us to experiment until we get things right.
Here’s to a wonderful 2021! -Meridian
