Ensuring Service Delivery

UPS Foundation helps charities get the most from their volunteers

Larry Robertson had often thought about becoming a mentor to a young boy. But he always hesitated, worrying that he and the youngster might not “click,” and wondering how they would spend their time together or whether he would even be able to invest the amount of time necessary to have a positive influence on a child.

Then he learned that his employer, MBNA America, a financial-services company in Wilmington, Del., was involved in a new program run by Big Brothers Big Sisters of America, in which volunteers spend an hour a week with a child at school. Mr. Robertson, attracted by the structured approach to the program, and the fact that a group of his colleagues would be participating, signed up.

The match, as it turns out, was perfect.

“It was gratifying from the day I met Jeremiah,” says Mr. Robertson about his 12-year-old “little brother.” Now hooked on the program, he has signed on to be a big brother to Jeremiah for the coming school year as well.

The Big Brothers Big Sisters program, which matches a company with a school, and then matches employees from that company with individual students, is working well for the charity, too. Last year, Big Brothers Big Sisters brought in 28,000 new mentors for kids through its school-based effort, up from about 12,000 in 1998, the program’s first year of operation. This year, the charity estimates it will again more than double the number of mentors participating in the school program.

The charity’s effort could also produce big benefits for other non-profit organizations. The school-recruitment project is part of an $8-million effort financed by the UPS Foundation, the grant-making arm of United Parcel Service, to help a handful of charities not only reinvigorate their own volunteer programs, but develop models that can be used by other groups.

Tough Challenges

The problems that the UPS grants are trying to solve are tough, but familiar to many charities: how to keep good volunteers coming back; how to attract more members of minority groups, youths, and other “non-traditional” volunteers; and how to better manage volunteers and use their talents and services more effectively.

“Most non-profits are faced with the same challenge: how to get more people, and how to get more out of the people who are already available,” says Robert K. Goodwin, president of the Points of Light Foundation.

Even though many charities are facing difficulties with volunteers, few grant makers support projects to help charities deal with volunteers — and that is in part what attracted UPS to the problem, says Evern D. Cooper, executive director of the UPS Foundation.

“We realized we had an opportunity to tackle an emerging issue facing the country,” she says.

At various points throughout its 49-year history, the UPS Foundation has focused on such issues as hunger and adult literacy. It turned to volunteerism in 1998, after a survey it commissioned found that many people believed the need for volunteers was growing, as non-profit organizations took on more responsibility for social services once left to government agencies.

But the survey also found that volunteers and would-be volunteers were turned off by what they regarded as an inefficient use of their time. And while most believed that more volunteerism was needed today than five years ago, they were devoting fewer hours to it themselves.

The findings from the UPS survey reflect those of the most recent national survey on giving and volunteering conducted by Independent Sector. In 1999, according to Independent Sector, a record 56 percent of Americans volunteered, up from 49 percent in 1995. The number of retired and minority people who volunteered was also up. But the survey also found that the average hours per week that people spent volunteering declined from 4.2 to 3.5.

The challenge for managers of volunteers, experts say, is to come up with projects that will make volunteers feel that they are making a difference, even if they are only doing it one hour per week.

“People love to do good,” says Ms. Cooper. “We are looking for new and better ways to capture that sweat equity.”

Expansion of Program

UPS started by making $2-million in grants to charities in 1998, then recently expanded the program by $6-million because it was showing such promising results.

Among the first-round UPS grantees, the Points of Light Foundation worked with five volunteer centers in a drive to recruit more kids as mentors and for other volunteering opportunities. And United Way of America enlisted the help of churches and local government agencies to get people moving off welfare to become volunteers to help other families making the same transition.

In the second phase of awards, the National Park Foundation is designing a program to increase the number of retired people who volunteer. And the Salvation Army is working with the Points of Light Foundation to come up with ways to take better advantage of the dedication of its 1.2 million volunteers, and to attract new volunteers among business executives and retired people.

Experts on volunteering say new strategies are needed quickly. Nan Hawthorne, who runs an Internet discussion group for volunteer managers, says that many charities “use some pretty outdated notions of how to appeal to people, like guilt and altruism.”

She adds: “Altruism is a nice thing, but it just doesn’t sell real well anymore.”

Not Sacrificing Quality

At Big Brothers Big Sisters of America, one of the nation’s oldest and best-known mentor organizations, the most pressing issue was finding a way to expand its volunteer list quickly without sacrificing the quality of its program.

The charity is trying to fulfill the promise it made in 1997 at the Presidents’ Summit for America’s Future, a meeting of political, business, and charity leaders designed to mobilize volunteers to help children. It hopes to reach its goal of matching 200,000 children with mentors by the end of this year.

So instead of relying primarily on its good name to draw in volunteers, the organization has concentrated on forming partnerships with businesses and schools, using $400,000 from UPS.

“This strategy is a cornerstone to our growth,” says Judy Vredenburgh, chief executive officer of Big Brothers Big Sisters.

The school-based program allows volunteers like Mr. Robertson to meet with a child at an already-determined place and time. And, Ms. Vredenburgh says, “volunteers have the whole infrastructure of the school to help them.”

It’s the perfect setting, says Mr. Robertson, the MBNA executive. “You can spend time one on one with your little brother or sister, or you can choose to get together with other kids and their big brothers and sisters.”

The school program has also been a success for the children, Ms. Vredenburgh says. An evaluation of the program at five pilot sites found that kids who participated saw their grades, attendance, and attitudes toward school improve, while problems such as truancy decreased.

With its second-round grant of $500,000 from UPS, Big Brothers Big Sisters is starting a similar partnership with Alpha Phi Alpha, a national black fraternity that has 700 chapters across the country. Big Brothers Big Sisters hopes to recruit 1,000 fraternity members in 17 locations to become mentors. Eventually, says Ms. Vredenburgh, the charity hopes to forge similar partnerships with all the major national black fraternities and sororities.

Attracting Parents

Big Brothers Big Sisters is not the only mentor organization that is looking to grow fast. Junior Achievement, a national organization that teaches kids about business, has vowed to increase the number of young people it serves to 11.5 million by 2005. Currently, the group reaches just under three million schoolchildren.

The charity has long provided schools with written materials and trained volunteers from the corporate world to introduce students to economics.

Three years ago, James Sullivan, then president of Junior Achievement of Middle Tennessee, in Nashville, devised a program that gave teachers a small stipend to recruit and train their own volunteers, many of them parents, using training materials from Junior Achievement.

Mr. Sullivan, who is now national vice president for strategic alliances and volunteers, used a $400,000 UPS grant to expand the program to five additional sites. Now 32 Junior Achievement chapters offer the program, and many more are getting ready to introduce it. In the past two years alone, the charity has added 15,000 new teacher-recruited volunteers to its ranks. They, in turn, have taught an additional 380,000 students.

While the volunteers aren’t necessarily the business people that Junior Achievement usually attracts — many are stay-at-home mothers — Jim Hayes, chief executive officer of the organization, views them as an invaluable, previously untapped source. “This has really worked brilliantly for us,” he says.

Mr. Hayes says he is especially pleased that the volunteers have been repeat participants. “Retention is a big issue with us,” he says. “We have found that with this program, 80 percent of the volunteers that signed up the first year were there the second year.” The reason: “A lot of parents like to be involved with their kids’ classrooms.”

Just as important, says Mr. Sullivan, is that “this experience changed us from a volunteer-recruiting mindset to a volunteer-management mindset. We’ve developed some wonderful training materials. Now we can go to other groups, such as the military, for example, and find a point of contact who will recruit.”

The charity is using its second UPS grant to further entice teachers to become involved in volunteer recruiting by working with the National Council on Economic Education to develop a workshop where teachers who recruit at least two volunteers for the Junior Achievement program can receive continuing education credits.

“It’s really a matter of learning to think way beyond the boundaries,” says Mr. Hayes.

Feeling Helpless

For 100 Black Men of America, which received $400,000 from UPS, thinking beyond boundaries meant moving to a new level of professionalism.

Until recently, the charity, which provides mentors for kids, and runs programs in career development, pregnancy prevention, and AIDS awareness, left it up to its 89 chapters to figure out how to recruit and use volunteers. But some chapters were unable to bring in enough volunteers to meet the growing needs of the children, says Thomas W. Dortch Jr., the group’s national president.

“We were getting mothers calling, saying, My child needs a mentor,’ and there was sometimes a terrible feeling of helplessness that we could not give them the kind of help that they needed,” Mr. Dortch says.

Now the organization has a national staff member who works with the local chapters to recruit and train volunteers. It has also developed a manual on volunteer management for staff members and a handbook for volunteers.

Since 1998, the group has added more than 650 volunteers through its new system, Mr. Dortch says.

Spurring Activism

City Cares of America, meanwhile, is hoping to deepen its volunteers’ commitment by providing them with a different tool: education.

The organization, a group of 41 affiliates that match volunteers with charities and causes, often for one-time stints, is starting Citizens Academies at five sites with $360,000 from the second round of the UPS program. The academies will offer volunteers courses on topics such as education, race, and urban sprawl for a fee of $10 to $25 per course.

The program is based on an academy started by City Cares’ Atlanta affiliate, which has drawn about 300 volunteers in the last six months, says Lisa Flick, program manager at City Cares of America.

“What it does is bridge opportunities between the more flexible kinds of volunteering that our affiliates might be known for, and more sustained community involvement and engagement,” Ms. Flick says. The ultimate goal of the program, she says, is to turn volunteers into civic leaders.

“It’s increasing their education and awareness on certain issues so they are not just going and cleaning the side of the road and saying, Wow, why am I doing this?’” Ms. Flick says. “They have some knowledge and awareness behind what they are doing.”

She adds: “That awareness and education can launch them into the next step of advocacy and activism.”

Meg Sommerfeld contributed to this article.