June 17, 1999 | Read Time: 1 minute
What We Learned (the Hard Way) About Supervising Volunteers
By Jarlene Frances Lee with Julia M. Catagnus
More charities are delegating the supervision of volunteers to employees who lack professional training or to volunteers themselves, write the authors. This book is intended for those workers.
Ms. Lee, who teaches courses on managing volunteers at Rutgers University, and Ms. Catagnus, the former publications director at Energize Inc., outline five principles: treat volunteers as full-time staff members, recognize the time it takes to recruit and train them (“Volunteers aren’t free,” they caution), instill mutual trust between volunteer and boss, share supervising duties with others, and be clear about why one’s organization needs volunteers in the first place.
Individual chapters examine training volunteers, communicating effectively with them, solving performance-related problems, conducting evaluations, and sharing information with the coordinator of volunteers — the person who sets policy but often assigns direct supervision to others.
Publisher: Energize Inc., 5450 Wissahickon Avenue, Philadelphia 19144-5221; (215) 438-8342 or (800) 395-9800; fax (215) 438-0434; e-mail info@energizeinc.com; World-Wide Web http://www.energizeinc.com; 154 pages; $21.95 plus $4.75 postage and handling; I.S.B.N. 0-940576-20-1.
