Energize Book Blog

Here’s an interview about a brand new book from Volunteer Vancouver, A People Lens: 101 Ways to Move Your Organization Forward.  I spoke with Colleen Kelly, executive director of Volunteer Vancouver, and Aaron Sanderson, Philanthropy Coordinator for BC Children’s Hospital Foundation and a key volunteer who helped produce the book.  You can listen to Colleen’s and Aaron’s answers to my questions by clicking each headphones icon, or read a transcript of our conversation by clicking the “Read More” link below.

Do you have a question about engaging highly-skilled volunteers or implementing a people lens model in your organization? Post your question as a comment or email it to us.  Aaron and Colleen will pick a question to answer in a future blog post, and we’ll try to provide some advice for everyone who writes in. You can purchase the e-book of A People Lens from the Energize Inc. Online Bookstore for only US$8.50.  If you prefer the paperback, visit the Volunteer Vancouver website.

What exactly is a people lens, and why is it important for volunteer-involving organizations?

What prompted Volunteer Vancouver to produce this book?

Aaron, from a volunteer’s perspective, what’s different about working with Volunteer Vancouver versus an organization that’s not using this people-first approach?

What’s the most important piece of advice you’d give to an organization that wants to increase the engagement of highly-skilled volunteers?

How do you think that the current economic crisis is going to affect organizations and their use of volunteers?  For example, will organizations look to highly-skilled volunteers for services that they might have paid for in the past?

Colleen asks Aaron to share what Volunteer Vancouver did well and could have done better in their work with him on this project.

Transcript of our conversation

Energize, Inc. (EI): What exactly is a people lens and why is it important for volunteer-involving organizations?

Colleen Kelly (CK): We have talked about a people lens here at Volunteer Vancouver for probably the last six or seven years, and it’s always talking to organizations and really working with them around looking at the people first, to look first through a people lens.  We believe most organizations give lip service to the idea that people are important, and yet they really look at their organizations first through many other lenses, and primarily the financial lens.  So if they have this much money, they can do this many things.  We believe you can do whatever you want, and you  have to engage all of your people well, whether you pay them with money or you pay them in all the intangible ways that we pay volunteers.

Aaron Sanderson (AS): Yes, the concept we were working with as a group of volunteers was that A People Lens was going to be a book that was on one hand inspirational and drive people to want to adopt this kind of philosophy, and on the other hand, it was going to show them ways that people have put it into practice already.

EI: What prompted Volunteer Vancouver to produce this book?

CK: I think what we were looking for was really a way to tell a bunch of stories that were about different kinds of volunteer engagement, the “volunteer re-invented” if you like.  I think the Corporation for National and Community Service uses those words, it’s about the volunteer reinvented.  We had the idea to do it, and decided the way to do it was basically by practicing what we preach, and engaging volunteers to actually do this for us. Aaron was the project manager, and did just a magnificent job of bringing those pieces together.

EI: So it sounds like you really put the people lens model to work in creating this book.

CK: We pretty much had to, otherwise it isn’t nearly as credible.  So, when you look at the beginning of the book, you get an understanding of how many volunteers actually put this together.  Almost all of the contributors were volunteers who had stories to tell, and then we had volunteer writers actually talk with those volunteers in order to write the stories.  Aaron actually looked after the whole thing as the project manager, and he is a volunteer!  So it was great; really the book belongs to Aaron as much as anyone else.

EI: Aaron, from a volunteer’s perspective, what’s different about working with Volunteer Vancouver versus an organization that’s not using this people-first approach?

AS: Well, it’s entirely different. There’s more longevity to working with Volunteer Vancouver. I can go and say to them, “these are my needs, and these are the things I can commit to,” whether that be a time frame, so I need a summer project and I can’t commit past summer, or I’m interested in these types of things. You can tell them, this is where I want to branch out and try these skills I have and want to develop. And then they’ll take that back and really think about “OK, what do we internally need volunteers for, is there a match?  And what do some of our members need that would be a match for this role as well?”  They really consider what it is that I am prepared to bring to the table. Should there be a version 2, 3, 4 of this book, I know that myself and the members of my team would be interested in coming back and working with that team again, not re-learning all the process, and making a great product again because we had such a positive experience using our skills.

EI: What’s the most important piece of advice you’d give to an organization that wants to increase the engagement of highly-skilled volunteers?

AS: I would say that you need to learn how to do it. You need to learn how to connect with these volunteers, and ask them what they can bring to the table.  So there is a training component that’s involved; that’s part of the reason the book was created.  There’s material there that shows you, for example, the project manager or volunteer posting that went out, and how that might be different than some of the traditional volunteer postings you might see.  So there’s ways to go about and do this that would be most effective. I think that Colleen Kelley and her group at Volunteer Vancouver have really started to master that, and are head of the curve on that.  As I look at all the different volunteering that myself and my networks have been involved in, we’re not seeing that same kind of thing, so it’s a chance to take this information and learn from the people and organizations that have started to adopt it, and have been working with it already.  So I would say, I would look to Volunteer Vancouver or a group that you can see is practicing this same type of people first mentality and ask them what you can do differently to get those volunteers on board.

CK: Certainly, for any organization that’s looking to head down this path, it’s absolutely critical that you begin to think differently, because we really have a concept, a construct in our heads, of what volunteers can do, and we almost have to  wipe that out of our brains completely, and understand that there are so many skills out there in the community. It’s much more about how can we engage those people to actually deliver our mission, and that isn’t the mindset in many organizations.  It’s mostly that volunteers do what we call the “hands and heart” jobs, and we’re suggesting that volunteers can do the head and heart jobs, and the head jobs mean that we’re getting incredible kinds from abilities from people.  So anyone that’s beginning to even consider this kind of volunteer engagement, I think where they have to start is really defining how they think of a volunteer.  I believe that’s the place to start.

EI: How do you think that the current economic crisis is going to affect organizations and their use of volunteers?  For example, will organizations look to highly skilled volunteers for services that they might have paid for in the past?

CK: One of our paid employees is actually going to do a presentation at the Alliance conference around exactly that.  Because we certainly fear that there are many more individuals out there that have lost their jobs that have great skills in specific areas, and we’ve not ever thought of those people volunteering.  We think this is an amazing opportunity for community organizations, and yet most community organizations will look at that skill set in the volunteer and oftentimes just discard it, and take the person and ask them to come in and fulfill the traditional volunteer role.  It makes us nervous, because there could be so much more impact in the organization if you engaged the people with those specific skill sets, if they can use their heads, not just their hands.

AS: If I could just add to that last question, I think that, as a volunteer, there’s no better time to ask than a time that, as a nonprofit, your budget’s cut and you need the extra help and you will depend on a volunteer’s expertise because you can’t get those services any other way, you just don’t have the funds to front it.  So as a volunteer, I know that you’re going to use me for all that I can bring to the table, and you’re going to take advantage of that. So I think that in the circumstances, there’s no better time to for us to ask volunteers to add their skills to our organizations, when they’re under these kinds of crunches and pressures.

CK: And one of the things we do really know, is that it’s so important in the organization for there to be that kind of philosophy and framework set at the very top.  For years and years, Susan Ellis’s book From the Top Down has been my absolute favorite, and I think that that piece hasn’t necessarily filtered into organizations yet.  Still, if it has to do with volunteers, well then we’ll talk to the person who manages the volunteer program. But if Aaron is going to walk in the door, most of the time, the people at the top have to understand that he has amazing skills to offer them.  It has to be a whole organization look at what he can do.  So again, even in concert with reading A People Lens, I would recommend that people read From The Top Down because I think that says it really well also.

EI: Do either of you have anything to add about the book, or the process of making the book, that I haven’t asked you about yet?

CK: It would be interesting for me to know, Aaron, what could we have done differently in working with you?  Would there have been ways that we could have engaged you more effectively, or were there things that we did particularly well that you would be able to mention?

AS: Well, it is mentioned in the book, but we were working with a very aggressive timeline, so should we be looking to do something like this again, we would want to leave ourselves with a bit more time than we had before.  But otherwise, the Volunteer Vancouver staff were great in allowing the group to really set the process for themselves, so we as a volunteer group consulted each other, decided our micro-timelines within the larger macro plan. And they really just observed, and injected themselves where they could offer some of that organizational knowledge, and kept us on track and inspired.  So I’ve been absolutely thrilled to work with the people that I have at Volunteer Vancouver and they did a great job with not taking over the ownership.  So from the very beginning, we took the concept that Volunteer Vancouver had, and ran with it.  And they let us run with it. And the work that we have published is really an accurate reflection of what the writers and the team have put together.  So it’s been genuine, and really well supported.

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Do you have a question about engaging highly-skilled volunteers or implementing a people lens model in your organization? Post your question in the comments or email it to us.  Aaron and Colleen will pick a question to answer in a future blog post, and we’ll try to provide some advice for everyone who writes in. You can purchase the e-book of A People Lens from the Energize Inc. Online Bookstore for only US$8.50.  If you prefer the paperback, visit www.volunteervancouver.ca.