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NYAVA provides New York Cares staff members valuable professional development opportunities and forums for sharing best practices with their peers. Our staff appreciates the opportunity to participate in NYAVA initiatives. 
GARY BAGLEY
Executive Director
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Our mission is to advance and serve the volunteer resources management profession in the New York City area.

Tip of the Month

When Work Is Not a Job...

Your volunteers may work very hard. In fact, they may have all of the qualities and skills you desire in a colleague! However, it is very important that you and your agency make it clear that their volunteer position is not a “job.”

Most volunteers embrace the role of volunteer and are quite content with the fact that they are not working in a job at your organization, but there are a lot of reasons why you need to be careful about this distinction:

1.    You don’t want to create false expectations for volunteers who may be looking for a job or a new professional career;

2.    You want to ensure there is no tension between volunteers and staff who may fear that their jobs will be eliminated or subsumed by volunteer labor;

3.    You need to honor staff line descriptions and definitions that are part of any union contract your organization has adopted;

4.    Some of your volunteers may come to your organization through a corporate, school or government program that is very strict about their volunteer status;

5.    Your organization has different legal liabilities attached to staff and volunteers;

6.    You don’t want to be “surprised” by an unhappy volunteer who wants to know why they are not getting paid for the same work that a staff person is doing;

7.    Clarity about expectations and roles is simply good form!

One of the most direct ways that you can preserve this distinction is by choosing your words carefully. Instead of developing a “job description” or “jd,” you might want to call it a “position description” or “volunteer opportunity.” You might also ask your co-workers to be more aware of the casual over-use of “job” when describing volunteers’ projects and activities.

Ultimately, these distinctions will strengthen your volunteer program. If you’re attentive to the specific niche that your volunteers fill and if you can show how it complements and enhances the work of staff, your program looks stronger to funders, community partners, colleagues and the public.


Sign up for our Principles & Practices course for more great volunteer management tips.

Featured Member

Staci-Jo Bruce

Staci-Jo Bruce

This month, NYAVA wishes to highlight Staci-Jo Bruce, a new member and the recipient of a NYAVA Scholarship to the June 2013 Points of Light conference in Washington D.C.  Staci-Jo is currently the Director of Volunteer Services at The Catholic Charities of the Archdiocese of New York (CCANY).  She oversees the mobilization, recruitment, and maintenance of the volunteer program for Catholic Charities NY and acts as a resource for over 90 Catholic Charities agencies. asd


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IN THE NEWS
Volunteering Linked With Lower Risk of High Blood Pressure

Volunteering might literally be good for your heart, a new study suggests.

Huffington Post, 06/17/2013
A Bookstore in Wahington Heights Knows How To Make The Show Go On
One evening, Veronica Liu arrived to find all the lights out at Word Up Community Bookshop, the completely implausible store that she and others ran as volunteers in Washington Heights, which is upstate Manhattan. New York Times, 06/06/2013
She\’s Getting Her Boots Dirty
"The No. 1 lesson you learn, being sixth out of nine children, is: It’s not about you,” she says. “Our family didn’t talk about volunteerism. It was just baked in. We went down and put the new missals in the church pews, and we volunteered at the Sunday soup kitchen, and we went with my dad to pick up the deaf children for church. New York Times, 06/01/2013
Volunteerism sees significant rise during crisis in Greece
The economic crisis appears to have generated a new spirit of volunteerism in Greece, a country where this social activity has not been particularly widespread in the past.Kathimerini, 05/28/2013
Animal Care Volunteers Bite Back
According to those who have spent time volunteering, though, few people show up on a regular basis to help out. Whether it’s the stress of spending time at a shelter where animals face the threat of euthanasia or the burden of working in an environment where, some say, basic needs of animals are often neglected, turnover is high.New York Observer, 05/15/2013

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