by Michelle Nunn, CEO, Points of Light Institute
As the 2010 National Conference on Volunteering and Service fast approaches, I want to share just a few of the trend-lines that we will be exploring and that I think will shape the possibilities for civic challenges ahead.
A first trend and imperative is to demonstrate how service can be a solution.
We believe we must demonstrate how volunteers, at scale, can create significant impact around three areas – education, the environment and economic well-being for families.
We believe that volunteer leaders are a key element of achieving this scale.
Grant Reed exemplifies the self-directing service leadership that we want to inspire and support.
While he was in college as a student at the University of Illinois, he created a student-run mobile health clinic that provides free medical screening services to the under-served and uninsured residents of Champaign County.
A significant portion of that community has severely limited access to healthcare services.
Since Grant’s mobile health care clinic began, more than 250 people without healthcare coverage have been tested and referred to local free medical clinics for further treatment.
Grant has now graduated but the mobile clinic continues, with the goal of screening 150 under-served people per term, and Grant plans to become a physician in an under-served rural community.
This is the power of volunteer leaders who are mobilizing others in service.
Imagine 500,000 networked individuals like Grant who were working in concert on the tough national challenges of our day.
The second trend line we’re seeing is a movement by corporations to leverage their unique assets to drive philanthropic goals that utilize the power of their employees and customers.
For example, earlier this year, HandsOn Network and Disney created Give A Day. Get A Disney Day.
For an individual’s day of verified volunteer service, Disney issued a voucher for a day’s free admission to one of its theme parks.
We had no precedent for this partnership and had no idea what the response would be.
In only 10 weeks, 1 million volunteers served and thousands wrote to tell us how they are now integrating service in the lives of their families.
Another partner, Starbucks held an “I’m In” campaign that offered customers a free coffee drink if they pledged at least five hours of volunteer time.
It raised 1.2 million committed hours in less than five days!
A final example, In this challenging economy, where the national unemployment rate still hovers around 10 percent, Monster.com and HandsOn Network have joined in an effort that directly benefits job-seekers and their communities.
HandsOn will be on site in many cities that are part of Monster’s Keep America Working Tour.
At these career fairs we will also share volunteer opportunities that can give job-seekers a way to acquire new marketable skills and contacts while making important contributions to community.
These are just a few examples of how corporations are re-imagining their corporate community engagement to fully deploy the human capital of their employees and customers to create change.
Finally, a trend-line that bodes well for the future- the millennials and the powerful example and new tools they are bringing to bear on change.
Let me give you a couple of examples of some of my favorite millennials:
In the after math of Hurricane Katrina, Hands On sent a young AmeriCorps Alum, Kelly Bentz, to aid in the cleanup in New Orleans, intending for her to only stay for a few weeks.
She ended up staying five years and is still working to re-build New Orleans.
She created and then ran a center where 100 volunteers slept in bunk beds in a church and worked to re-build the city- tens of thousands of volunteers came to work through what became Hands On New Orleans and is now serving as one of the central volunteer hubs for the oil spill efforts in that area of the Gulf Coast.
Kellie represents what may be the next great Service Generation.
The millennials were born roughly from the early 1980s to the mid-1990s.
According to many studies, their defining characteristics include: civic-mindedness, the desire to make a difference, love of a challenge, ease with all things tech and global thinking. They want to produce something worthwhile, they are success-driven and goal-oriented.
They are young people such as the 20-somethings who started Crop Mob Atlanta in April to support small farms engaged in sustainable agriculture.
Many of these farms are barely hanging on.
Using a Facebook page and personal networks, they have created what is now a crowd of folks eager to carpool for a few hours and then spend weekends weeding, hoeing, raking, planting, sowing in the heat in rural Georgia.
The slots on these monthly crop mobs filled up so quickly that they now have waiting lists.
That’s the power of passion linked to service and the power of new forms of self-organizing.
They are young people such as in San Francisco, who co-founded The Extraordinaries last year.
The Extraordinaries has pioneered the field of micro-volunteering, helping organizations and supporters turn short bits of spare time into social value from the bus stop, cubicle, or couch, using mobile phones. For example, you could translate, fact-check, transcribe, edit.
After the earthquake in Haiti, The Extraordinaries built a system that allowed people to help find loved ones by tagging news images coming out of Haiti and matching those images to faces of missing people.
These examples exemplify how the brave new world of social media tools allows us to mobilize people in more efficient ways, and to engage them more often and more effectively. We can now talk with volunteers, not at them, across time zones and across countries.
More importantly, social media allows people to organize themselves and each other for causes — be they sustainable farming, helping Haiti or running after-school programs — that resonate with their passions.
The youth of the millennial generation and progressive corporations and nonprofits are leading the way in creating new forms of scale and impact through service.
They are solving problems, meeting needs, and creating impact in ways that coincide with their interests and strategic goals.
At this critical juncture for our communities and nation, we have a tremendous opportunity to work together- combining resources, creativity, and new ideas to transform the world through the power of people- our most valuable resource.
