Helping Volunteers Develop Programs with Impact

A Case Study from Leadership MetroWest

by Kristen Saulnier
TSNE Communications Intern

The economic downturn has created a “new normal” for nonprofits: learning to do more with less. Volunteers now play a more vital role than ever. How can you keep volunteers engaged, motivated and working effectively when their motivations for success can be very different from those of your employees? We can learn some lessons from Leadership MetroWest’s 2010 Leadership Academy.

The Leadership Academy, a 10-month program run yearly by Leadership MetroWest in Framingham, Mass., develops the community leadership skills of professionals living and/or working in MetroWest Massachusetts. The academy includes a Class Project, the collaborative development of an event, program or ongoing initiative to benefit the local community. The 2010 class members’ goal was to create a simple, sustainable model for charity drives to assist citizens lacking basic resources in the MetroWest region of Massachusetts. The class wanted to ensure that the model could be successfully adapted by a variety of organizations.

The program’s mission is not to create a project as an end in itself, but to use it as a way to help class members learn about leadership. But this year’s class project and the process used to bring it to fruition provide a valuable lesson in best practices for engaging volunteers in project development – and helping them maintain momentum.

Create a Solid Foundation: Respect and Trust

The first step in working with volunteers on a project is to bring them together, according to Leadership MetroWest Executive Director Helen Lemoine. “What happens at the beginning makes the difference,” she says. For the academy, Lemoine brought the 25-member class together for a two-day retreat so that they could get to know each other - “not professionally, like a typical workplace orientation, but personally.”

The members of the diverse 2010 Leadership Academy class included public, corporate and non-profit sector professionals from a variety of backgrounds. Each had the opportunity during the two-day retreat to share events that had shaped their lives and perspectives. This is necessary, Lemoine says, to “break down barriers, change assumptions and prejudices, and help foster teamwork and collaboration.”

Learning from each other, and coming to understand each other, quickly created a bond between the participants. “By lunchtime the first day,” notes Lemoine, “the bond was palpable.”

Choose a Direction

Empowerment

While it’s important to give volunteers structure and support, part of the process of engaging and empowering a group to create a project is allowing them to self-direct, motivated by their passion for the issue and their desire to make a difference. Asking them also to think strategically about their intended outcome is critical even at the earliest stages of program development.

Lemoine notes that every year, a few academy members step up proactively to become facilitators and drive the project forward. “It’s always cool to observe this process,” she enthuses. Again, this happens organically, as the group’s bond allows members to trust each other and adapt to different leadership styles.

Gentle Guidance

Beginning with a broad discussion of community needs, the 2010 Leadership Academy class used brainstorming techniques to narrow down ideas, with Lemoine offering only suggestions and gentle guidance. “It’s so important to step back and allow the class to choose the process organically,” she says.

The group’s brainstorming session, followed by weeks of discussion, voting and refining, eventually led to the idea of a sustainable local food drive. (The food drive later evolved into a charity drive model.) Participant Kathy O’Leary, of the Framingham Education Foundation, proposed the model based on Care and Share, the successful long-term food drive at her children’s elementary school.

Care and Share, developed by former Framingham Grade 5 teacher Jane Shapiro, is wonderfully simple. Each month, one type of food is collected in bins at the school for donation to a local food pantry. The drive became a habit at the school, says O’Leary, “Care and Share was just a given - every month we collected something. No fanfare, it just was, ‘Here’s this month’s item,’ and then hundreds of items would show up.”

The Leadership Academy class members agreed that this was a great foundation for their project model. And they were clear that a one-time drive was not their intended outcome for the project. They wanted to create a sustainable model that could be used for food collection, a clothing drive, collecting toiletries or any other kind of charitable drive that an individual, small group, large company or municipality wanted to conduct.

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