Pulling Up the Drawbridge on Volunteers

Aaron Hurst, founder and former head of the Taproot Foundation, penned a fascinating Op-Ed piece that appeared in last weekend’s Sunday Times Review. In it, Hurst argued that the inability of nonprofits to absorb, train, and manage willing volunteers, “masks a broader problem in our society, which is the lack of purpose in our regular jobs.”  Instead of looking to nonprofits to provide the “cause” missing from our lives, Hurst suggests that we look to the workplace to provide meaningful, purpose-driven work, and, more importantly, to ourselves, for cultivating the “self-awareness” that allows us to “take ownership” of our interior lives and create that sense of purpose and engagement so sought after in volunteer service. Coming from the former leader of the Taproot Foundation, whose mission is to “engage professionals in pro bono service that drives social change,” this is pretty bracing stuff. But this is no fuzzy New Age parable. The problems faced by nonprofits as they try to digest volunteers are real and unforgiving.

A week or so before Hurst's Op-Ed appeared in the Times, the Chronicle of Philanthropy published an article (subscription required) by Suzanne Perry that looked at the declining number of volunteers over the last 10 years as measured by the Bureau of Labor Statistics' Current Population Survey. Noting that BLS figures showed a decrease of two million volunteers in 2013, Perry expands on the capacity problems faced by nonprofits as they try to absorb—or avoid absorbing in more and more  cases—what is still a flood of volunteers. As an example, she writes that since last August, while almost one million LinkedIn members have expressed interest in serving on nonprofit boards or contributing other skills-based services, only 1,000 volunteer positions have actually been posted on the service. Perry also found that in fiscal year 2013, almost 12 million people visited VolunteerMatch but only 140,000 volunteer positions were listed during that time. The prohibitively high cost of employing skills-based volunteers jive with my own examination of the world of legal pro bono, where the dollar value of pro bono hours contributed by attorneys and partners in the top 250 U.S. law firms was dwarfed by the cost of managing and maintaining the legal pro bono marketplace by Legal Aid Societies, Defender Associations, Bar foundations, etc. Now this raises the question: why is so much time and money expended on stoking the coals of volunteerism if nonprofits are not equipped to handle them?

The country’s largest funder for service and volunteering is the Corporation for National and Community Service (CNCS). Founded in 1993, CNCS has a 2015 budget of more than one billion dollars and operates through three major programs: AmeriCorps (which includes the original VISTA program established in 1965 as part of the LBJ’s War on Poverty), Senior Corps, and the Social Innovation Fund.  CNCS is a huge player, and a market maker, but its mission is to act as a catalytic and coordinating force to help create community-based solutions to a whole host of societal problems through national service and public-private partnerships. CNCS is not in the business of building the capacity of nonprofits in general to utilize the volunteers that they and others inspire to serve.

Though organizations like Taproot and Points of Light have built invaluable marketplaces and knowledge exchanges for the promotion of volunteer service, there are no funders like CNCS in the social or private sectors. Private foundations and companies make relatively few grants aimed at increasing the organizational capacity of nonprofits to absorb volunteers, and, consequently, nonprofits continue to turn away volunteers because they lack the infrastructure to manage them. Perhaps finding a solution to this structural problem will provide someone with the personal cause they’re looking for.