Government Must Do More to Help Nonprofits Make Use of Volunteers

In just a few weeks, the Democrats and Republicans will ratify their party platforms to guide the presidential race.

Odds are nobody will say what matters to many nonprofits: How can we best embrace the American spirit of volunteerism?

The United States is one of the few developed countries in the world without a national body dedicated to advancing volunteering, and it’s time for nonprofit leaders and others to push government leaders to put one in place.

Some people think the Corporation for National and Community Service provides a leadership role in promoting volunteerism, but it mainly works to promote programs that give young adults stipends to work at nonprofits or other community operations.

That is important work, but it’s not the same as the kinds of volunteering that are so critical to promoting the social good: the volunteers who guide tours at museums, wire school classrooms to be Internet-ready, rescue lost animals, test streams for pollution, and mentor troubled youngsters.

It takes just one look at the Obama administration’s budget request for the national-service agency to see how low a priority unpaid volunteers rank, including the many older Americans engaged through the RSVP program.

The budget would eliminate Learn and Serve America, the program that has introduced millions of young students to service, and removes the Volunteer Generation Fund, a new program that was supposed to help charities recruit and manage volunteers.

The intense focus the corporation places on paid national service has been building under three presidential administrations.

Nothing is wrong with strengthening AmeriCorps, but because the corporation continues to define itself as an organization that cares about all volunteering, not just paid national service, it is getting in the way of promoting the real changes that would allow more nonprofits and more volunteers to thrive.

An agency that was truly interested in promoting volunteerism would be doing all it could to make clear that today’s challenge is not the lack of people willing to volunteer, it’s the large number of groups that are unwilling or unprepared to welcome the skills and ideas of people who want to help.

While volunteers can’t make up for the government budget cuts that will long be a part of life during the economic recovery, they can help stretch vital programs that serve the needy and improve the quality of life. So when it comes to looking at the bottom line, the financial returns from supporting programs that promote volunteering by all Americans are much higher than the return on national service done by only a few.

So if we truly care about making sure any American who wants to volunteer can find a meaningful way to do so, how do we get past relying on the Corporation for National and Community Service?

Many countries rely on a “national volunteer center.” Most such centers are government agencies or they receive a sizable percentage of their budgets from their national governments, as well as money from private sources.

While these centers vary in scope and effectiveness, they clearly focus on encouraging and celebrating volunteers and supporting the organizations that engage them.

At one time, the United States was on the way to establishing a national volunteer center. When major legislation was passed in 1971 to create Action, a federal agency that included the Peace Corps and other prominent government-run volunteer programs, Congress also started the National Center for Voluntary Action.

Forty years of evolution, politics, and high-profile mergers (at least five times) have brought us to what is now called the HandsOn Network.

But we are even further away from a true high-level body representing the full scope of American volunteering, to provide resources, to exchange ideas in the United States, and to represent us internationally.

Here is one example of why this matters. The United Nations declared 2001 the International Year of Volunteers. Neither the Corporation for National and Community Service nor Points of Light (the predecessor to HandsOn) had any interest in participating, leaving the United States the only major country in the world without a national celebration, research to assess the state of volunteering, or effort to shape public policies to stimulate volunteerism.

In 2011, when the U.N. organized IYV+10 to mark the progress made since the 2001 effort, the same neglect of this international effort was repeated by the new players.

So here’s what I would ask the president to keep in mind as the mission of a new volunteerism organization. It would:

• Advocate for the needs of people who manage volunteers by accumulating information about volunteering and managing, supporting national and regional conferences, celebrating volunteering, and shining a spotlight on it.
• Stake out a position on what is right, not just on what is the politically popular way to get money for a particular project. That means educating many people in decision-making, legislative, and appropriations roles about volunteering, such as explaining that it is not free labor or a substitute for paid workers.
• Represent the volunteer perspective in legislative debates. Such advocacy could have prompted the IRS to require a report on volunteer involvement when it revised the Form 990; instead, it put an optional question in a place that was even harder to find and less likely to be filled out than it was on the original form.
• Work to lift the ban against volunteers serving in the federal government, which currently allows volunteering in only a few designated programs (National Park Service, Cooperative Extension, veterans hospitals, and so on). The Corporation for National and Community Service cannot invite volunteers to help in its work at all. State, county, and municipal governments long ago overcame that hurdle. It’s time for Washington to get on board.
• Stimulate fresh research about volunteering, with a focus on practical implications. Data about American volunteering are largely collected by the Bureau of Labor Statistics and the Census Bureau, which ask people if they or their family members volunteer. Those self reports must be balanced with facts from organizations that use volunteers. To provide additional insights, a national center could work with philanthropy scholars to persuade them to stop neglecting people who donate their time in favor of those who give money.
• Strengthen local volunteer centers and state offices of volunteering so they coordinate projects, grant making, and activities with the input of volunteers.
• Reach out to international volunteer groups to exchange information and support volunteers involved in global causes.

It’s time to create a nationwide office that is committed to supporting, enabling, and celebrating volunteering. That’s the kind of issue our candidates for public office should be talking about as they rally voters.