MAVA’s Annual Meeting is always a great chance to catch up with old friends, forge new connections and get inspired by our award winners’ stories of cutting-edge volunteerism. This year, I’m excited to gather with MAVA members for another reason – the chance to expand our awareness of changes in our state, and pool our experience to guide what lies ahead for volunteer engagement in Minnesota.
I’ve been sharing the results of MAVA’s most recent (2018) trends survey with different groups and stakeholders for the last year, and I’ve seen how much interest there is in not only the “what” part of this data, but also the “so what” – what we can do with this information to equip ourselves to manage change. In our work to better understand how changing conditions affect who volunteers in our state, how they are engaged and what motivates them to contribute, we’ve focused on discovering new ways to help volunteer leaders become more effective at engaging volunteers. No matter what we uncover, our findings are always strengthened by the stories that survey respondents share about how they cope with change and the creative strategies they develop to meet these changes head-on.
This work holds special significance for me and my connection with MAVA. My first involvement with MAVA was through the Strategic Directions Committee, which was charged with assessing new developments in our field to determine what our members might need to manage change proactively. When the recession of 2008 – 2009 hit, our group heard conflicting stories about its effect on volunteer programs – from organizations inundated with potential volunteers to those suffering staff cuts to others swamped by community needs. We realized we needed more than anecdotal information to get a pulse on what was happening, so the first MAVA survey on trends, “Status of Minnesota’s Volunteer Programs in a Shifting Environment” was born. Through surveys of volunteer engagement leaders in 2009 and 2011, we learned about the impact of the economic downturn on our sector, including unanticipated outcomes such as the role that volunteering played in keeping job-seekers active, emergence of more complex roles for volunteer leaders, and greater reliance of many organizations on volunteers to meet their missions. After the recovery that followed, surveys in 2013 and 2014 again surfaced new developments, including increased interest by volunteers in short-term roles and using their workplace and leadership skills in the nonprofit arena. Information we gathered through these surveys drove MAVA’s in-depth explorations of the trends that emerged, and the resources – from white papers to trainings to pass-through grants – we created as a result.
Flash forward 10 years, and we are again seeing a wave of significant change that will reshape volunteer engagement in our state. The widening age and ethnic diversity of our population is having an outsize impact on how we understand what Minnesota communities will need to be healthy and sustainable, and how our organizations and institution can help meet these needs. In our sector, the volunteer workplace has become even more expansive than the paid workforce in terms of who participates – many organizations now draw their volunteers from five generations – and increasingly complex in terms of what people are seeking from their volunteer experiences. Volunteer engagement leaders are once again in the position of responding to critical change; choices we make while managing these changes will shape our field’s approach to volunteerism for the next decade or more.
I hope you’ll join me on November 14th to dig deeper into what these shifts mean for state of volunteerism in our state, and how we can meet the challenges they present. After getting the big picture about current and coming demographic changes from Minnesota State Demographer Susan Brower, we’ll explore their impacts on volunteer engagement with a recap of MAVA’s field-based research on developments observed by volunteer leaders and strategies for creating more inclusive volunteer programs. You’ll also learn about new tools, courtesy of Minnesota Compass, to mine information that will help you profile demographic shifts in your community. Most importantly, MAVA members extraordinaire Mary Quirk and Terry Straub will bring us together to do what MAVA does best – share ideas, brainstorm strategies and collaborate on taking charge of our collective future. To get the most out of this day, we need you! Learn more about what’s in store and register here.