“All We Did is Pick Weeds in a Field”: A Painful Volunteer Engagement Lesson
“All we did is pick weeds in a field.” Heart sinking, I listened. A client called after serving as volunteers for a project that I had arranged and said this. Wait, that cannot be right! I did a site visit with the organization, one of the biggest and best run nonprofits in town-- they showed me the project and it was good -- developing an educational area in their environmental program for school kids. You all said you wanted an environmental and youth-focused project. This was volunteer day, match-made-in-heaven perfection! So, what happened?? The upshot was the volunteers were not shown their return on investment (ROI). They are there to make a social impact (investment) and need to know how the task of today relates to the mission (return). Sadly, in my story, the volunteers didn’t get the purpose or the connection to the mission and felt like it was a waste of their time. The organization and I had missed effectively laying the groundwork to d