We Need to Bring Outside People In, If We Want to Win

I have personal and professional reasons for believing there should always be at least one person in leadership at a non-profit organization where it pains them to waste even one drop of human potential. If you have little experience with the non-profit sector, you may be surprised, given the humanitarian mission of most, that this isn’t already a top priority. In my experience, the non-profit sector is not immune to (and sometimes embraces) capitalist values of prioritizing Things over People. There are plenty of distractions out there, not just the pursuit of profit, to keep us from being present with fellow human beings.

As a young person, most of my attempts to be a volunteer at non-profit organizations working toward radical social justice had been unsuccessful ones. In contrast, when I started off as a volunteer for the first time for Meals on Wheels, then a community art gallery, I was plugged in right away. The work wasn’t challenging, but I knew what I was doing contributed to a concrete goal.

When I wanted to volunteer at places fighting for systemic change, that were advocating for affordable homes and organizing residents to make demands on the city where I grew up, I was met with more hand-wringing than anything. I was not personally affected by the problem. I was a young, by all appearances white, woman in college with few skills to speak of other than an appetite for reading community organizing manuals. When I wasn’t met with, “we appreciate your interest, but we don’t have anything you could do,” I was given tasks that, to me, did not lead to a particular goal or help anyone directly.

I am not alone. Finding the right place to volunteer is a bit like dating, and the venn diagram of people ready to volunteer and organizations ready to involve volunteers leaves our movements with a narrow pool to work with. My personal challenges led me to center maximizing human potential in this way in my organizing work. As an Americorps member for three years, I learned the tools to create the infrastructure to involve volunteers. My political perspective led me to feel strongly that a program that centers human potential should not just be the luxury of well-resourced non-profits. Luckily, I found a place to work that agrees. For the past three years, I have worked to take what I have learned as a part of social-service non-profits to the radical social justice work I do now to advocate for tenants’ rights in California.

If I have found any use for having a “Volunteer Coordinator” (and I hope I’d see use for myself) at an organization that already has grassroots Organizers, it’s to have someone to take the perspective of an Outsider trying to get in, or an Insider who knows the work a little from being helped or organized and who wants the opportunity to “give back” for what they feel they've received. For better or worse, in the organizing traditions I have been exposed, priority is put on the outreach and support of those immediately affected by a problem, and if you’re not delivering “services,” very little time is spent thinking about how volunteer contributions could be central to the work.

That’s why you won’t usually find a Volunteer Coordinator/Manager/Director of Community Engagement at a grassroots social justice organization and very few Organizers take on an “evangelical” perspective. It’s considered a luxury, to think about more than just the immediate problem at hand and the people closely affected by it. Perhaps we think if we just had the resources to organize 100% of those affected by the problem, we would win.

I think we’re wrong. I think we should never expect to organize 100% of people affected by any problem, because it’s not a resource issue. I think in any given population there are people who are radicals (or have the potential to be radicals) and people who are not, and those people can be found both on the Inside or Outside of a problem (for instance, I have encountered more than one tenant who doesn’t “believe” in rent control and landlords that do). I think if we look at many organizations doing “online organizing” a great deal of those people engaged on the issue are not directly affected by the issue.

What the school of “online organizing” does well, since the backbone is communication, is in communicating clearly about goals, what is needed to win, and how people can help. The radicals both Inside and Outside of a problem will step up. Signing a petition is only the beginning of what it takes to win, but it’s a start. Our issues are often complex, and other people are relying on us to communicate what is needed. All sorts of problems come up if we expect people to just take a guess.

It’s important that an effort is led by a strong, developed leadership of the people most closely being affected by an issue, but at some point it needs to be communicated how everyone else can help. There is strength in numbers, and there is even more strength when we consider reaching out to allies in a way that respects what they bring to the table.

There is also great value in involving rank-and-file members in more day-to-day organization activities as volunteers. They can probably do more than receive a service, or show up at a meeting or rally, or be a part of a steering committee, if asked. Everyone has something they’re good at. If we are so strapped for resources, why aren't we asking for help from the people we've helped? If we have a humanitarian mission, why don’t we take action on the belief that every person has value and something to contribute?

On the mistrust of “volunteers”

Sometimes it’s natural to be closed off from seeing the potential value in another person. People directly affected by a problem understandably might be suspicious of people coming in wanting to “help” who aren't also affected. What’s in it for them? Will they stay? Or will they leave when things get tough or the semester is over? These are important questions, but these fears are less likely to come up when the request for help comes directly from the people themselves. Usually many communities being “helped” have little control or say in who is coming in to “help” them, and the thing people probably enjoy least is loss of control of a situation. Sometimes a volunteer comes in thinking they know best and they don’t respect community knowledge. A humble volunteer might do the work to build trust, but an organization can also set volunteers up to succeed by doing the legwork to reach out to a community when coming up with a plan to involve volunteers.

Organizers talk a lot about the importance of “self-interest” in motivating people, and so we’re suspicious of altruism. We think if someone is just altruistic, that motivation isn’t good enough. We forget that finding someone’s “self-interest” is not always material and direct, that humans are spiritual animals. It feels good to help other people. Maybe you love accounting but this organization can’t afford an accountant. You can be doing what you love, for people you love. Who wouldn't want to do that? Usually, at the very least, volunteers, whether they come from Inside or Outside, want to know that their time is being spent well. They want to feel their particular skills and talents are being put toward real, tangible goals, and that the work they do is appreciated and respected by the people leading the effort. I would argue that the desire to help is a legitimate self-interest and that it shouldn't be looked at with suspicion automatically, without context.

On leadership that figures out how others can help

There should always be someone at the leadership table who is tasked with figuring out how we might ask other people to help. I also see this as maximizing human potential to reach our goals. There are no easy answers to the question of how people might help, and in grassroots organizing solutions should come from a feedback loop of asking the people dealing with a problem what kind of help they want, asking staff of an organization what kind of help they need, understanding how this might be framed within a program, or a campaign, or a 5-year-plan, and articulating this to all the kinds of people you think might be equipped to help.

A volunteer coordinator, or person within an organization who does a lot of work with volunteers, probably is not in a position to figure out all of these things for themselves because they probably miss out on a lot of key conversations. They are probably not in a leadership position. They are probably not a part of the conversation about campaign strategy. They probably do a million other things and have it communicated by another staff-person that We Need a Volunteer for This Thing and the volunteer coordinator posts a listing on the internet or they go tabling somewhere. Then they talk to the people who are interested in volunteering, and they teach that new person about the organization. They probably help with scheduling the volunteer and coordinating volunteer appreciation events.

If you’ve got a volunteer coordinator with leadership abilities, you’re missing an opportunity with every strategy discussion they’re absent to benefit from more creative thinking about involving volunteers and growing the movement. Without a volunteer coordinator at the table ready to speak up, the question of figuring out how people Inside and Outside our work can better help is probably an afterthought of leadership. It’s unlikely there’s a functioning feedback loop, and involving volunteers is thought of by leadership as just a resource to be deployed rather than a population that requires its own kind of organizing strategy. The work of a volunteer coordinator done well requires a lot of conversations, strategic thinking, and outreach through a variety of channels. You can go “get” a volunteer for something just about as easily as you can find a leader from your grassroots base. It’s not like going shopping. It’s a numbers game. Your net should be wide, you should know what you need from volunteers, and you should be ready to listen to what they have to say and what they want to contribute.

We learned in organizing 101 that we should always have an ask ready to go. There are things we always know we want and need. We need more money, members, supporters, a bigger list, meeting space, someone to bring the snacks to the meeting. What about someone to provide one-on-one peer support? Someone to do implement a better supporter database? Someone to make outreach calls to potential allied organizations? In my own experience of being asked to do very little when I thought I could do more (but wasn’t sure what that could possibly be with little understanding of the work), sometimes people appreciate being asked to take on a bigger role. Sometimes the idea of doing something that takes more time and effort doesn’t occur to a potential volunteer until they hear about that idea and get won over by it.

I think our movements grow when we ask for more, and they stay small when we aren’t sure what we want or we’re afraid to ask or we’re cynical about the ability of people to deliver. Involving volunteers is as simple, really, as knowing what you want, how to communicate that to people, and thanking those that help. In my experience no one at an organization will put the “how can we better involve volunteers” hat on automatically and all the time if they wear other hats. It’s extra work. It’s at least a full-time job. We don’t think about how much time it takes us to figure out how to help someone help us, and we get frustrated. Maybe we think they should already know what we want, or they should go figure it out on their own and come back to us. But by then we’ve lost an opportunity. There is too much suffering out there for us to sit wringing our hands.

The best thing any social justice organization can do right now is to pick a person, regardless of the other things they may be doing, who is always supposed to think about how we can bring Outside people in and better involve Inside people as volunteers. And make sure that person is in a leadership role and part of the conversations required to do the work well. Give them as much time as your organization is able to work on this and protect that time. There’s lots of tools and support for what questions to ask and how someone might think about involving volunteers. The key is to make that hat really important and really clear, and to bring it to every conversation about how to get things done.