Where Have All The Volunteers Gone?
It seems that it has gotten harder and harder to raise volunteers for non-profit organizations over the past 25 years. As usual demographic analysis definitely predicted the situation long ago. As people aged memberships would diminish, and executives would lose all the old and knowledgeable people who had filled the executive positions. It was a mathematical certainty.
At that time, 25 years ago, foresight suggested that young people should be sought out immediately, but the worm had turned and it was a different time. Many women who thirty years previous were available to fill vacant volunteer responsibilities were now in full time jobs taking on a part of the family budget and following their career aspirations. People were going back to school to become qualified for new and more complicated management positions. The beginning of the squeeze on the middle class had already started and people needed money for the work that they did. Government regulations had grown, and by-laws and constitutions began to regulate non-profits. People with kind volunteer hearts became less and less available. Volunteers took on lighter loads like volunteering at the hospital or helping kids learn to read. Volunteer lawyers, accountants, bookkeepers, and executive directors disappeared.
If we zoom closer to our own time, we can see without too much analysis why volunteers disappeared almost immediately during the pandemic when volunteers stopped meeting in person. The pleasant social nature of volunteer participation was obliterated by masks, defensive 6 ft spaces, circles on the floor, vaccinated and not vaccinated, and those notoriously annoying and socially destructive lock downs. People retreated and isolated themselves, often to their detriment, and continued that to this day, often in fear of still catching “the virus”, or even dying. Yikes! What a world we have inherited from this frightening era.
Of course, the difficulty is that organizations still need to be organized, supervised, and able to fulfill their traditional rolls. Clubs need to run, paintings need to be hung, beavers need to earn their badges, and the girl guides are still selling cookies. But these days those who have journeyed on and stuck out the course no matter what, are pleading with the public, anybody, to volunteer to fill empty executive positions. The shortage is so bad that some organizations are on the verge of collapsing when heretofore they have lasted already 50 long years.
The miracle of “Zoom” has solved some parts of this problem. Volunteers can meet by Zoom instead of driving those longer distances. Volunteer help can be gleaned from across the country because of the convenience of modern communications. One person can teach 100 people or more at a time when it comes to demonstrating how to grow tomatoes or how to make a lino print. You Tube has become many instructional videos, and in this process many people who might otherwise have become volunteers are now learning things instead.
Perhaps it is time to start looking at the modern acronym “AI” in terms of how it may be helpful in solving the lack of volunteers problem. Bill Gates was seen in today’s headlines with his arms raised in an almost religious hallelujah pose declaring we might expect a three day work week as a result of Artificial Intelligence and how it will change our employment practices. If everyone is going to have on average 2 more days of free time it would only follow that the potential to obtain more volunteer help would be extraordinary. But alas, we are ahead of ourselves here as the need for volunteers is here and now and those particular AI developments are just a dream at present.
Logic says that a lot more organizations are going to fold if we don’t solve this problem in good time.
Peter Marsh December 10, 2023
