According to the Millennial Impact Project, episodic volunteerism is increasing in popularity as our younger generations look for ways to share their wealth across many different causes and passion areas. Businesses and other associations are always looking for team-building activities that give back to their local communities as part of their corporate social responsibility programs. Finding ways to bring short-term volunteers into your nonprofit can be tough, especially if your organization relies heavily on training or extensive screening mechanisms to ensure long-term commitments.

Engaging, worthwhile experiences are not too difficult to develop and you never know who might come through your doors. Some organizations have received legacy donations and major gifts as a result of a well-executed one-time volunteer event. The best part: You don’t need a fully staffed volunteer program to make this work. Start planning now and your organization can begin to tap into the wealth of knowledge and skill available in short-term volunteer opportunities.

Here are six questions to ask your organization before embracing episodic volunteer opportunities. 

1. What tasks do the existing volunteers complete that require minimal training and are completed in a few hours?  These are the PERFECT tasks for episodic volunteers and are even better if you can recruit some of your existing volunteers to become project…

Since the 1980s, nonprofit, for-profit and public organizations have formed partnerships to produce and distribute various goods and services. The growing magnitude and complexity of socioeconomic problems that face societies throughout the world has generated the urgency for cross-sector collaboration to emerge. Examining these cross-sector collaborations reveals advantages for nonprofit leaders seeking greater impact.

In addition, the interdependence between nonprofits, corporations and governments will continue to intensify during the 21st century.  In Nonprofit and Voluntary Sector Quarterly, James E. Austin and M. May Seitanidi said, “Collaboration creation will continue to accelerate and likely become the organizational modality of choice in this century.”

A cross-sector partnership is an alliance between organizations from two or more sectors that commit themselves to working together to develop and implement a specific project. These alliances are becoming more strategically important for all sectors. 

They can be from business, government and civil society, and they combine the competencies of each sector to resolve a specified problem or challenge. Public/private…

I knew that nonprofit work was right for me soon after joining the corporate world, when I realized that much of the work was just about making money and maximizing profit. But I had a unique consultant skill set which could be used in the nonprofit world.

Consulting and strategic planning skills have a critical place in the nonprofit sector. Sometimes it can be a place where people have the heart to serve, but do not have the business savviness to run a sustainable nonprofit. That’s changing (thanks to training and education from places like the ASU Lodestar Center), but it’s a place where I knew I could contribute.

My journey began with a nonprofit called TechnoServe where I began utilizing my consulting skills as a volunteer consultant in East Africa. My task in Uganda was to develop strategies for the maize and dry bean industries, in order to increase the income of smallholder farmers.

I never realized how challenging my task would be, as my initial research showed unfamiliar constraints and data that was lacking and sometimes unreliable. Uganda is an interesting country and has been referred to as the “bread basket” of East Africa, with extremely fertile soils and two harvests per season in most regions. It is said to have the potential of feeding all of East Africa. Despite such great potential, Ugandan maize and bean farmers are plagued with poor…

Changemakers of the world are passionate about their communities and organizations, but helping others ignite their passions and sustain improvement requires sustainability strategies. Sparking action in a community encourages advocates for community engagement; it can be a “potential catalyst, seeking to fan an initial flame.” Hildy Gottlieb, founder of Creating The Future, describes community engagement as “the process of building relationships with community members who will work side-by-side with you as an ongoing partner, in any and every way imaginable, building an army of support for your mission, with the end goal of making the community a better place to live.”

This is connecting and interacting with others, building relationships, cultivating awareness and ensuring these actions are purposeful. The overall consensus from professionals across the state is that outputs – tangible, numerical data – correlate to outreach, while outcomes – documented action – are consistent with engagement. 

Outreach is a vehicle for community engagement that can be used for many purposes in organizations. Outreach leads to an action. As Linda Flower suggests, however, in her article “Partnerships in Inquiry: a Logic for Community Outreach,” there is a certain tactic in…

It is hard to express in one blog my entire week-long experience with nonprofit leaders from Japan, Syria, Uganda, Nigeria and different parts of the United States at the American Express Leadership Academy 2.0 at the Aspen Institute.

This fellowship, which brings together 15 next-generation leaders each year, has made a profound impact on me and my work, beyond our readings and discussions about Aristotle, Hobbes, Chimamanda, Confucius, Frederick Douglass, Hayek, Soto, Machiavelli, Guha, Plato and Martin Luther King. 

I learned that while one person may be inspired by the UN Declaration of Universal Human Rights, another may be angered by it. While one may be proud of the Declaration of Independence, another may be ashamed of it. This is all because of our various personal experiences and social perspectives.

There is not one single story. It is only through time and interactions that we come to see and understand the whole story and connect with one another to make greater social impact.

…