^^My mom, Judy, and sister, Ellie, at a fundraising event for The Seasons Performance Hall, where my mother is the volunteer coordinator and Ellie is the director of operations. 

Well, I meant to post this in time for Mother’s Day, but as with everything this month, I’m running a couple of days behind.  Recently, I asked my mother if she had any insight on volunteer management she could share with me, as I was planning an upcoming post on the topic.  Though my mom, Judy, is amazingly good at dispensing advice (wanted or, ahem, not) on all subjects, she is uniquely qualified to advise on the proper care and feeding of your organization’s volunteers.   My mom has been a volunteer manager in many capacities: professional volunteer coordinator for my elementary school, as a school librarian responsible for the wrangling of event and daily volunteers, and, for the past four years, the volunteer manager for The Seasons Performance Hall, a non-profit event and music venue in Yakima, Washington.  The Seasons has substantial volunteer staffing needs, with each performance (multiple shows per month, plus a week long festival once a year with back-to-back programming and educational events) requiring a hardy team of volunteer ushers, food servers, merchandise sellers and ticket-takers.  My mother coordinates the volunteer staffing for the Seasons and is nearly always doing something to thank them- making cookies, sending hand-written cards, planning a fun thank-you event just for them, etc.  Having worked many an evening as a Seasons volunteer (every time I visit my family, in fact), I can say from personal experience that she gives very thorough direction and has a warm, enviable relationship with her volunteer base that many non-profits would love to emulate.  Her volunteer advice was so good and thorough that I’m presenting it below without further comment or even very much editing:

Top 6 Non-Profit Volunteer Management Tips 

Go Teenagers!

It’s hard to find literature that will be appropriate, helpful and motivating for kids who are looking to participate in the non-profit world.  A lot of teenagers have strong and complex feelings about issues within the community or on a larger scale, but don’t have a lot of practical ideas as to where to outlet their energies.  In middle and high school, I often fantasized about starting up a shelter for battered women/bookstore/cafe/free lending library- I had a lot of big ideas and I knew which causes really struck a chord in my heart, but as far as activism went, I mostly bounced around youth groups in my area, like S.Y.P.P. and E.Y.E.S. (Empowered Youth Educating Society, now defunct).  So much of young life is about imagination, about dreaming big (I planned to open the hybrid shelter/cafe as soon as I’d won my screenwriting Oscar and, of course, the Pulitzer) and that kind of energy can be a bracing and welcome force in the activist community.

My DonationPay counterpart, Noah, started an organization in Berkeley, in his teens: Project Great Outdoors.  His non-profit has gone onto a long and successful life and was originally born of an intelligent, engaged teenagers’ grand imagination, social conscience and infectious energy (which has certainly been a boon around the office).  One of these days, I’m going to rope him into writing a fabulous post about his experience as the young helmer of Project GO, but sadly, this is not that day.  My point, really, is that with some support, resources and adequate information, teenagers can get a lot done, out there in the non-profit sector.

Here are some resources and inspirational tales to help them get started:

1.) The Teen Guide to Global Action

2.) Generation Change: Roll Up Your Sleeves and Change The World

3.) Be The Change, Change The World

4.) Volunteering: The Ultimate Teen Guide

5.) Freedom’s Children: Young Civil Rights Activists Tell Their Own Stories

6.) It’s Your World- If You Don’t Like It, Change It

7.) Future 500: Youth Activism and Organizing in the United States

8.) Youth-Led Community Organizing: Theory and Practice

9.) Let Me Stand Alone: The Journals of Rachel Corrie

10.) The Journey Is The Destination: The Journals of Dan Eldon

All these books are available on Amazon for very reasonable prices.

The last two on this list won’t apply to everyone, but they certainly provide models of how to be a proactive person in a complicated society.  I received the last book, The Journey is The Destination, as a gift on my 18th birthday from a dear friend and it has continued to inspire and motivate me for the last twelve years.  If you are lucky enough to be the parent or friend of a budding teenage activist, help them get out there in the community and give them all the support you can.  They’re going to need it.

Happy Monday.

A.J.