Infrastructure to Support Volunteering

Happy New Year and new millennium! Susan uses this milestone to envision her hopes for the future of professional development in our field, along with some move-it-forward resolutions.

Why are so many academic research studies on some variation on the theme of what motivates people to volunteer? They reflect researcher inexperience with real-life volunteers and an inability to frame more complex questions deserving of study.

Reinventing Conferences

By Susan J. Ellis

Susan admits to dissatisfaction at the repetitive format of professional conferences that have a "sameness" that is increasingly feeling dull. What other options are there for producing great learning events? 

Leaders of volunteers around the globe are making conscious efforts to connect with one another and we need to foster such communication more actively. Looking ahead to the UN's International Year of Volunteers 2001, we can take advantage of this pending event to create exchanges among the leaders of volunteer efforts -- beyond IYV. [This Hot Topic remained active through August 1998 to permit more responses from global colleagues.]  

Turbulence at the State Level

By Susan J. Ellis

States were mandated to create a  a "Commission on Community Service" to administer federal funds and several merged their Commissions with previously-established State Offices on Volunteerism. Caution!

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