If you are a volunteerism practitioner
in North America, you have probably heard the name "Harriet Naylor" somewhere.
The Association for Volunteer Administration has named its most prestigious
award after her, as have several state associations. She is frequently referenced
as a pioneer and many of the current leaders in the field speak of her mentorship
with fondness and respect.
"Hat," as she was always called (in later years she frequently referred
to herself as "old Hat"), was truly a seminal force in the evolution of volunteer
management. Trained both as a social worker and then as an adult educator, Hat
worked tirelessly to persuade both of these academic disciplines to recognize
the importance of the effective leadership of volunteers. In the early 1970s,
she was a key staff member of the National Center for Voluntary Action, from
which the Points of Light Foundation eventually evolved more than twenty years
later. In 1973, she published Volunteers Today (Dryden Press), the
first real book written about volunteer program management. It was Hat who coined
the word "volunteerism" in a booklet she wrote in 1969, in order to differentiate
it from "voluntarism" and "'voluntary."