In much of New England, and many towns through the US, significant advice, work, and decision making is made by volunteers (or stipended individuals). These people may be elected or appointed, and they offer their time, energy, and ideas on a wide variety of boards and committees.
Healthy, active, and well-supported boards and committees are vital to the policy-making process and any well-functioning civic ecosystem, and this initiative is meant to support the people and groups who do this important work. I talk about the importance of this in my workshop series on “Authentic and Effective Public Engagement.”
Unfortunately, many towns find that their volunteers have taken on a huge burden (the 80/20 rule of a small group of people doing most of the work… sometimes closer to 95/5 or 99/1), some are aging out of some positions, and often there aren’t many new people coming in, leaving key areas of boards and committee without full, robust happy and supported volunteers, and failing to transfer the great knowledge from long-time volunteers to newer people through coordinated succession planning.
In this guide, based on best practices from my time in South Orange and as a municipal manager, working as a consultant, and most recently provided as advice to the Hanover Selectboard, I share just several of many best practices that exist to engage more volunteers and create a permanent, sustainable pipeline of community leadership that ensures that you can make decisions with a robust environment of stakeholders involved in meaningful conversation and policy oversight or advice.
Community nomination process
This is a big best practice giveaway!
Typically, “calls for volunteers” are worded something like “We need more volunteers, are you interested in volunteering?” or “We need you” with a picture of Uncle Sam.
The problem with this approach is that it expects people to nominate themselves. This may not incentive the right people to get involved, as many who would be great volunteers would not feel comfortable nominating themselves. Additionally, data shows that in many environments such as this, that under-represented groups, especially women and people of color, tend to be disproportionally not engaged when asking people to nominate themselves, and that for example, women tend to be represented better in leadership roles when there is a peer nomination process in place. This is an easy fix.
Next steps: Consider how your town can design and implement a simple volunteer recruitment program where community members are asked to nominate other community members to serve on boards/committees, and to fill out a short several-question survey about why they are nominating those people. Then have the Town follow up and interview those individuals to get more information and move forward through that pipeline process with that as the starting point.
Public Service Loan Forgiveness
One of the reasons that data shows that younger people are volunteering in fewer numbers is the growing financial burdens of housing, healthcare, and education, especially for people with student loans. Although the PSLF program is meant to help repay people who volunteer and work in public service, and although the simple text of the program actually includes the word “volunteer” the rules actually disqualify any individual and their position unless it is paid. Most people don’t know this, and it means that volunteers are ineligible to use that time for PSLF, whereas someone doing the same work at $1/year or $1,000,000/year would be eligible.
We propose doing more exploration with counsel to confirm, but doing something such as offering to pay any volunteer $1/year for their time on a Board/committee. The goal would be allow them to submit their position to potentially be counted for student loan forgiveness, which comes at virtually no cost to the Town, and a huge benefit for the individuals. This may help recruit and retain more volunteers from younger generations to help supplement many of the long-standing volunteers, many of whom are stepping down or retiring from their positions.
Next steps: Work with your municipal attorney to explore developing a simple policy that pays volunteers a nominal fee, if they request it, so that their time volunteering may (no guarantee) be eligible for student loan forgiveness.
More accessible one-time volunteer opportunities
One of the best ways to create long-term volunteers is to start out as a short-term volunteer. Many people who are heavily involved can think back to specific, individual events, activities, or programs that got them inspired or interested to be more involved. Instead of jumping right to asking people to volunteer on a committee, which is a multi-year commitment of a significant amount of time, we may want to consider offering more one-time opportunities, and then make those more clear on our website and elsewhere.
People volunteering on a clean up day, or for an election, could easily become more involved over time through those great starting points. We should identify and work to create more of them.
Next steps: Work with each of your town’s boards and committees to create 1-3 one-time volunteer opportunities for each of them that can be advertised to the community and help create an easier pathway for new volunteers to get involved.
