Ten Tips on Managing Volunteers - from Hazon

This week I spoke with Judith Belasco the Director of Food Programs at Hazon, whom I met recently at a meeting for Covenant Foundation grantees. Hazon holds an annual food conference and bike ride that are entirely run by volunteers. I have always been eager to learn more about the wisdom of managing volunteers since a big part of what community of practice facilitators do is manage volunteers. Judith mentioned that the founder and Executive Director of Hazon, Nigel Savage, has a background in volunteer organizing that he learned from Limmud UK.

Below are a few key points that I learned from Judith.

1. We work hard to help people feel that the more they take on the more they are influencing the outcomes. Volunteering is an opportunity for them to learn new things, build new relationships and be changed by the process.
2. My approach is to understand ahead of time what the tasks are that need to be done and then invite volunteers in to help make things happen. That is in contrast to other approaches where you first ask a volunteer to engage with you and then figure out what they can do.
3. We have a document that lists all the various roles that we are looking for. We first show them the various options before we invite them to participate in any particular role.
4. It’s an ongoing job scouting for outstanding volunteers, when we hold a conference staff and current volunteers are told to "keep your eyes out for people who are amazing who should we have on the executive committee."
5. You don’t know who will say yes unless you ask. On average half of people say no or cannot do the job as needed so you need to have a long list of possible volunteers.
6. I ask people that I would like to work with. We will be spending a lot of time together so it’s great to enjoy the people you are working with.
7. Volunteer positions come in many sizes: from the chair and members of the executive committee who have 2 meetings per month ,a mandatory planning retreat in CA and work an average of 1 to 5 hours a week, to people who volunteer to call members to find out if they would be willing to read the Torah for the event.
8. Be clear about what you are asking from them, give people a clear sense of the time and financial commitments. Our volunteers are all also paying participants of the programs they plan. Be sure to raise the money issue even if they do not.
9. Develop templates and timelines and re-use documents from previous years so you get smarter and more efficient every year.
10. Staff works with volunteers to prepare agendas and organize monthly meetings, which is often a significant piece of work. If the meeting is well structured with clear next steps a lot of work will happen during the month.

Let us know what your tips are for managing volunteers! Do you think these tips all apply to your work managing volunteers in a community of practice? In what ways do they apply and in what ways do they not?

Naava

Sharing Anchors Community

A recent blog posting by Harlene Appelman, Director of the Covenant Foundation, quotes Clay Shirky's book Here Comes Everybody on the notion of "sharing anchor[ing] community." Harlene, thank you for calling our attention to this concept.

What I find particularly exciting about how "sharing anchors community" is that the process is a spiral that builds community strength step by step, over time.

When one person shares and is well received, it helps others feel more trusting. When others feel safe and trusting it encourages them to share. As more people share, more people feel comfortable and share in turn, and so the cycle goes on.

What is going on? Why does it work? Often we do not share for fear of being judged, thinking something along the lines of "I wonder what others will think of what I am doing?" But once someone shares and is received well others realize "oh, I have something I can contribute to others." We all like to be recognized for what we do and to be validated for our accomplishments.

Over time, community members begin to share more deeply and readily, and over time a spiral of sharing leads to trust, which leads to more sharing, which leads to more trust -- creates a sense of community. Above is a diagram that captures the cycle.

So what can you do to help build a trusting community? Even the smallest step is important.

• Share something you know with someone or a group who might benefit from it.
• Express gratitude to someone who shares -- drop them an email or mention something the next time you see them.
  

As in a row of dominoes, you may set off a chain reaction of trust and sharing. And the world certainly needs much more of these!

Naava

Looking over each other's shoulders

The Kehilliyot CoP is exploring ways we can “look over each other's shoulders” to learn about community facilitation from the practice of peers. We are grateful to Darim Online, who recently invited Kehilliyot members to join the webinar "Foundations of Social Media" to learn about how Darim presents to their CoP members.

Several Kehilliyot members, including myself, joined Lisa and Caren on the webinars. We found it enlightening and useful. We learned alot from watching how Darim used the Webex software to share the desktop, use PowerPoint, and chat -- all in real time -- thus keeping up a variety of stimulating modes of conversation and interaction. The Webinar showed us some great examples of how some organizations are succesfully using social media.

One interesting concept we took away from the seminar was the notion of official and unofficial "outposts". Our Facebook profiles, Twitter feeds and other accounts on third party social networking sites are all examples of “official outposts.” When we comment on someone else’s blog, in their space, we are creating an “unofficial outpost.”

Participants felt they learned quite a bit from the session. Naomi Less (Storahtelling, Evaded Issues in Jewish Education,
Jewish Chicks Rock) said, “Amazing call.. I learned a great great deal. I was also struck by the "outpost" concept.”

Thanks Lisa and Caren. Great job! If you want to find out more contact them at info@darimonline.org. For information about becoming a Darim member, check out http://www.darimonline.org/capabilities/users_group.php.

Community Weaver Role for Kehilliyot

This is a protocol for a Kehilliyot Community Weaver Role. It was created on 8-17-09by Naava Frank of Knowledge Communities and Elana Rivel of Jewish Outreach Partnership based on the "Greeter Program" created by Jewish Outreach Partnership. We welcome your experimenting with this role and sharing your feedback.

Goals:

1. Help strengthen the community
   
2. Help individuals members get to know each other
   
3. Help new or peripheral members connect with the community and its tools
   
4. Help the community fine-tune its learning activities to meet the needs of members

Role: Two-Parts

Part I. 15-20 minute phone call

Talking points

• What CoP work do you do?
  
• Let me tell you what I do? A practice I am proud of, a challenge I am facing.
  
• Share 2 or 3 ways I use Kehilliyot
  
• How are you using Kehilliyot? Are you comfortable with the technology? Are learning activities working for you? Phone calls, Topics? Listserv?
  
• Who else do you know or are you contact with from Kehilliyot?

Part II. 2-3 contact points over the next 2-3 months (over email or phone)

Suggestions

• Connect over a resource shared (what did you think of the last email… I thought it might apply to your work)
  
• Ask how is it going?
  
• Send a resource you think might be of help
  
• Summarize a call they missed
  
• Share a problem or success of yours
  
• Inquire/follow-up about a problem they shared in the first conversation
  
• Respond to their posting
  
• Introduce them to someone else
  
• Ask to be introduced to someone else

Possible Hebrew terms for this role:

• Kashran (connector)
  
• Arev (a responsible community member – traditional Judaic texts)
  
• Oreg (weaver – modern Hebrew translation of weaver)

Let us know if you try this and how it works.

Naava

Your First CoP Meeting of The Year

Many of you (like myself) are planning or have just completed the first meeting of the year for your CoP. It would be neat to pool our knowledge about good strategies for starting the year. Maybe some ideas for having 'fun' as well.

In one local CoP for educators, Reuven Kimelman is addressing the group on strategies for teaching the Rosh Hashanah Davening.

Other ideas:

· Have the group brainstorm topics for the year and prioritize them
· What did we like about our CoP last year and what do we want to do differently?
· What does quality look like in our field? members give examples
of quality they experienced in other arenas.
· What are the problems we want to address together?
· What do we want to contribute to the broader field this year?
· Do we want to do any joint projects? writing, blogging, a conference, a presentation?

What was your first CoP meeting like? How did it work?

How to weave a tighter community

How to weave a tighter community

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Advice on meeting reminders

It’s the beginning of the academic year, and Naava and I are busy finalizing our schedules for 2009-2010! As our calendars filled, we began to wonder about the most effective way to distribute meeting reminders to maximize awareness (and attendance). We don’t want to send only one announcement and expect meeting attendees to save it in the chaos of their email inbox, but we don’t want to send so many that it becomes annoying and they stop reading our communications altogether.

We came up with the following tentative schedule:

-- 1 month before: first communication, hold-the-date

-- 1 week before: reminder

-- 1 day before: another reminder

-- possibly one final reminder on the day of the event

Naava suggested we ask Kehilliyot members what they did when they were leading and organizing meetings, as well as what kind of communication worked best for them when they were the invitees. We received many helpful responses.

Naomi Sayegh of BJE writes, “I did some research on conference calling. It was suggested sending out reminders on all the times you noted. In addition, they suggested the day of the meeting—a half hour before the meeting.” She continued, however, “If the meetings are at the same time every month then there is no need for so many reminders. I appreciated the time when there was a reminder the day of a meeting.”

However, Rebecca Egolf pointed out a possible technological snag: “The problem with any reminders that are sent out the day of the meeting is that if you are getting messages from Google Groups in a digest then you don't receive it till the end of the day after it is too late. Day of messages would have to be sent directly by email and not in GG or many of us miss them.”

Thanks to everyone for the great advice!