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Civic Engagement as a Catalyst for Community Change: 2021 Research Grantee Dialogue 

Mobilizing And Managing Volunteers For Positive Community Change 

ANDREA ROBLES: Thanks, Connor. So, this is our last panel of the six. And I want to thank everyone for 

taking time to be with us. The panelists for this session are comprised of our 2015 and 

2017 research grantees. And they all specialize on civic engagement and volunteering 

and have published widely on these topics. I know I look, and we look, very much forward 

to learning from you and how we, as an agency, can incorporate some of your findings.

For those of you who are on for the first time, in terms of our format, we will first hear 

from our panelists. We will about their study and they will answer a few questions. And 

then we will go into breakout rooms and then come back to finish the discussion. And so, 

I will allow the panelists to just introduce themselves as they go. And then we'll come 

back to questions. So, thank you. So, we start with, I believe, Peter Levine and Kei.

PETER LEVINE: Hi, everyone. Thanks for having us. So, I'm Peter Levine, the information is up there.

And Kei Kawashima-Ginsberg is joining me for our team. I think I'm going to make sort of 

our introductory comments. And she'll be available for the conversation, I hope. And I 

should also say that, from our team, Jodi Benenson and Noorya Hayat presented the 

actual results of the research that was funded by the corporation—what, the day before 

yesterday? I was on the call, but I don't remember which day.

So, we've already presented our detailed results. So, I wanted to make a much broader 

comments about the state of things. And one more prefatory comment is I'm going to 

speak in the first-person singular. It's just what I think, because I want to make sure that 

I'm not presuming to speak for anyone else. And I don't know whether everybody agrees, 

and Kei may not, and she should speak up. But at the same time, I owe so much to my 

colleagues. I've gotten these opinions from other people from listening and learning from 

other people, including Kei. So, but still, this may not be what she would say.

So, stepping way back, I wanted to say that I think what we need people to do in America 

today and in the world today is to ask the question, “What should we do in functional and 

reasonably diverse groups that can actually do what the people decide to do?” We need 

people to ask, “What should we do in functional and reasonably diverse groups?” And 

there are a lot of other good questions to ask, like “What should Joe Biden do, or what 

should America do about racism, or structural racism, or lots of good questions that are— 

or what should I personally do in my own life?”

Those are good questions. But the question of “What should we do where the group can 

actually act?” is the core civic question. It educates us and enriches us to ask that 

question with people who disagree with us. So, it benefits us. It makes us better people. 

And it leads to better outcomes because groups that ask that question—what should we 

do?—and do so collectively and actually act, they make the world better. And when many 

different groups are asking that question in a society at the same time, power is shared 

and distributed and that is the basis of democracy, actually.

So, then I think people in all sectors of society and all roles can be part of asking that 

question. So, you can ask that question and be part of a group that asks it, as the 
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Civic Engagement as a Catalyst for Community Change: 2021 Research Grantee Dialogue 

Mobilizing And Managing Volunteers For Positive Community Change 

employee of a private company or as a civil servant, such as our colleagues here from 

AmeriCorps, or as a student, or as an unpaid volunteer, or as a retiree. You can ask that 

question in many different roles. And it's good that people can ask that question from 

many different roles because we need everybody. And I think each sector in our society 

has both special assets to contribute and also limitations.

So, you can ask the question—what should we do?—if you are a bank manager and so 

you're representing a bank. But there are some limitations, too, because the company 

has its own needs and agenda. And so, there are some limitations. So, they're strengths 

and weaknesses each sector. So, in that context, I think AmeriCorps offers, and other 

government-supported national community service programs, state, as well, have some 

particular advantages. They really are spaces for people to get together and ask, “What 

should we do?”

Though I also think we have to keep our eye on some limitations that always emerge in 

these programs, not just now, but over their whole history back to the 1930s. Are the 

groups reasonably diverse so that different perspectives are really being raised and 

considered? And are the people in these groups really able to ask, “What should we do?” 

and then do what they decide to do, instead of being told what to do? So, are they 

implementing someone else's plan or are they making a plan and implementing it?

So that's always an agenda keep in mind when I think about AmeriCorps. But then the 

main point I want to make now is that AmeriCorps and other kinds of national and 

community service programs are part of something bigger. Because what we want 

people to do is to ask the question, “What should we do?” in all kinds of settings. So, as 

we recover from the pandemic and as we address racial injustice, and climate crisis, and 

other crises, we need people asking questions about what they will do about these things 

in many different settings.

And we need to see ourselves as working together to address these crises, all of us. I 

think it's important to say because the last time we recovered from an economic crisis 

and there was a Democratic president in the Oval Office, the recovery from the recession 

was not framed as the American people are rebuilding our country in different 

configurations and different groups that we, the American people, are rebuilding the 

country. So, it wasn't framed as the public work of a people. It was generally presented 

as a set of governmental policies and interventions that would either work or not work.

And the person we were supposed to evaluate to see whether it would work or not work 

was Barack Obama. So, the message that got transmitted to the American people was 

the government is going to try to rebuild the country and you should decide whether the 

government's doing that or not. And I think that was a great source of weakness. I think it 

was a political source of weakness because it wasn't an inspiring message. And I think it 

was inaccurate, false actually, because government played a role of course in changing 

spending, and taxation, and other things, but the actual work was being done by people 

in all kinds of different configurations, including civil servants, including federal 
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Civic Engagement as a Catalyst for Community Change: 2021 Research Grantee Dialogue 

Mobilizing And Managing Volunteers For Positive Community Change 

government officials, but also including everybody else. After all, most of the recovery 

money then and in this recovery goes to corporations or nonprofits, or states, or schools, 

to a bunch of entities, but it's not the federal government that actually spends the money.

So, in that context, I think it's really important to frame the recovery as public work, as all 

of us asking, “What should we do?” in a whole variety of contexts, across sectors, 

meaning that the federal government is part of it.

And federal government employees are a really important part of it. And AmeriCorps 

volunteers and participants are a really important part of it, but part of something that 

needs to be much more distributed and shared That's the point, I don't know, that’s the 

point I was hoping to make as a part of this conversation, and I'm looking forward to 

questions and comments, including from Kei and everybody else, later in the session. 

Thanks.

PRESENTER [ANDREA ROBLES]: Thank you so much, Peter. Those are good words to start this off and 

actually this entire dialogue and where we are at right now. Kei, do you want to have do 

you have some words you want to say now, or would you like to wait for the questions?

KEI KAWASHIMA-GINSBERG: Really one quick thing that really resonated, Peter—thank you so much 

for this—and that is related to some of the work we have been doing supporting 

educators, who often come as a volunteer to things like professional learning 

experiences, just to improve their skill or they are volunteering on a committee or some 

kind of decision-making board. And whenever we are really working with teachers who 

really need to do something but have some emotional block. For example, we have to 

actually think about the power to make decisions and where that power sort of transmits 

from, say, federal government to state government to school district superintendent to 

teachers and then to students.

So, we often think about if we think about students or educators as stakeholders, the kind 

of people that need to stay engaged in some endeavor that we're doing together, I try to 

think about where the power sits and how to make sure that each chain of command, so 

to say, have the power and agency to be able to also give and share the power with 

those who are behind them, in terms of that power change. And I think it applies actually 

to the volunteer management. So, I'll stop there.

PRESENTER [ANDREA ROBLES]: Thank you. And we look forward to hearing more in just a few 

minutes. So, I'm going to pass it to Mark Hager.

MARK HAGER: Thank you. Do you all see me yet? I think I've started my video. 

PRESENTER [ANDREA ROBLES]: We have your slides. We have your slides.

MARK HAGER: OK. Well, I would say welcome to my living room in Phoenix. Maybe my video will pop up 

here in a minute. I'm want to take my three to five minutes here just to really introduce the 

scope and purpose of the study. And then I have a variety of observations I want to 

branch out into. But I'll save those for the Q&A that we'll have after our initial 
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Civic Engagement as a Catalyst for Community Change: 2021 Research Grantee Dialogue 

Mobilizing And Managing Volunteers For Positive Community Change 

presentations here. I titled this “A Volunteer Management Capacity” because that's how 

we sort of refer to this particular study.

And by we, I mean the two people that you see in the picture here. I'm on the right. I'm 

Mark Hager. I'm a faculty member at Arizona State University. On the left is my long-term 

co-author, Jeffrey Brudney who started working on this topic with me back in 2003. And 

we looked like we were getting about to push the work through to completion when about

two months ago, on Easter day, Jeff Brudney died. So, I'm left to try to promote, get the 

outputs of the research out into the world without the help of my long-term friend, and 

mentor, and co-author on this project, Jeff Brudney.

So, let me show you a few of the things here that we've come up with on the next slide 

here. I will say that it has a long history. You've got to go back to was at the 2002 State of 

the Union Address when then-President Bush, the younger President Bush, gave his 

address to the nation that included a call for more people to be engaged in their 

communities. And the field liked that a lot. It's not every time that a sitting president really 

encourages people to get out and volunteer more in their communities.

We also got a bit of push-back from the field, in saying that it's nice to get the promotion 

but a lot of nonprofit organizations can barely have the capacity to give the good 

experiences to their volunteers now, let alone having a new army of Americans come 

marching to their door. So, much to their credit, the federal government created a White 

House Office. They engaged what we call the Corporation for National Community 

Service, now AmeriCorps, to get a better handle on the readiness of nonprofit 

organizations to engage their communities.

They got some funding from the UPS Foundation and went looking for a research 

partners that a research partner. That ended up being me at the Urban institute, at the 

time, where we surveyed U.S. nonprofit organizations and congregations to try to get a 

good snapshot of what the readiness was of our community organizations to engage 

volunteers. That ended up being fairly influential. A lot of people referred to the work, 

even in fairly recent days. I can hear people pointing to it, the factoids that we got back in 

the day about the readiness, the volunteer management capacity of nonprofit 

organizations to engage their volunteers.

The thing is, it got older every year. I remember in 2013, we tried to get going to a sort of 

10-year retrospective on what volunteer management capacity looked like. We weren't 

able to mobilize at the time. It was more along 2016, 2017 when we see that the CNCS— 

now AmeriCorps—is looking to fund research that looked like it was right up our alley.

Could we use that opportunity to return to the volunteer management capacity study and 

get a more current snapshot of what was going on? Next slide, please.

That work is done. We collected all of our new round of survey data of nonprofit 

organizations, all in 2019. We can call it sort of a return to the U.S. to see what the 
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Civic Engagement as a Catalyst for Community Change: 2021 Research Grantee Dialogue 

Mobilizing And Managing Volunteers For Positive Community Change 

readiness was to engage volunteers. That's great. I love that we're able to do that. And 

there's now a brief that I will put a link to in the chat right here for those of you that want 

to get to this 15-page public brief. I'm still working on a landing page to promote this more 

widely.

A shortcoming here is that it's all collected pre-pandemic. We collected this data in 2019. 

And then in early 2020, the field changes quite a bit. We learn some interesting things 

about what was happening, though, in this more current snapshot a volunteer 

management capacity. You see a couple of bullet points here on the slide. One, VMC— 

we call it Volunteer Management Capacity—hasn't changed a lot since 2003.

Organizations are still, to a large extent, using the same practices to the same extent, 

engaging their staff members in the same ways in order to promote volunteering. It's 

good when you see it. But there's just not enough of it.

A second thing we see that is changed from 2003 is that more and more volunteers are 

interested in episodic or periodic assignments or short-term assignments. And this 

introduces new, or at least greater, challenges about how our nonprofit organizations and 

our volunteer managers are going to best engage volunteers that have a different 

appetite for volunteering than we've had in the past.

Thirdly, we see that electronic tools and social media have been rearranging how we 

interact with volunteers. And this is something we would have, I think, found anyway. But 

we start seeing it in different ways, and new ways, and increased ways as the pandemic 

came along. And luckily—I guess we'll say luckily—CNCS, now AmeriCorps—gave us a 

supplemental opportunity to engage this question. So, we had a separate second 

project—and let's go to my last slide here—to look at how nonprofit organizations are 

using technology in order to engage their volunteers.

Now, when I proposed this, I didn't know COVID was coming along. It was just—I should 

put this in quotes-—"lucky" that we had a pandemic really crystallized how nonprofit 

organizations needed to use technology in order to engage their volunteers. So, this 

third-year supplement, now in its fourth year because we couldn't really do this data 

collection in the throes of the pandemic, really provides an opportunity to focus on 

technology responses to the pandemic. We call this TEVA, or Technology Evolution in 

Volunteer Administration.

I've done this work mostly this year now in collaboration with a international organization 

called the Council for Certification in Volunteer Administration. They have certified about 

900 professionals in the United States and Canada in volunteer administration. So, these 

are our most serious professional volunteer administrators and in the United States and 

Canada. We were able to survey about 60%—60.7%—of these people, 546 cases 

regarding how they're using technology through the pandemic and, particularly, the 

challenges they've had in engaging using technology to engage volunteers.

The thing we're doing now at ACU—the data collection was done at the University of 
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Civic Engagement as a Catalyst for Community Change: 2021 Research Grantee Dialogue 

Mobilizing And Managing Volunteers For Positive Community Change 

Chicago—but this summer, I have five graduate assistants who are conducting online 

focus groups and transcribing those focus groups with 100s—I mean, the response has 

been amazing—hundreds of CVAs, those professionals with a certification in volunteer 

administration. But they're just providing detailed, vibrant illustrations of the promise— 

and this is important point—the perils of technology adoption. I'll talk a little bit more in 

the Q&A about the challenges that we have in using technology and social media in order 

to best engage our volunteers. Thank you.

PRESENTER [ANDREA ROBLES]: Mark, thank you. And we really look forward to, as always, what 

you're finding through TEVA and your other study. So, we will get back to you in just a 

little while. So, I'm going to turn it to Pam.

PAM PAXTON: Great. Hi, everybody. I'm Pam Paxton. I'm at the University of Texas at Austin. And what I 

want to do today is talk to you about just one project that came out of the funding that my 

research team received from AmeriCorps, specifically a project that was asking the 

question, “how do nonprofit organizations succeed in increasing donations?” and more 

importantly for this panel of volunteers, amid widespread, frankly, competition for these 

resources?

So, in this project, the team worked to better understand how nonprofits attract donors 

and volunteers by connecting to their emotions. And this was a little unusual because 

prior research has largely focused on the financial characteristics of nonprofits, with the 

idea being that donors are rational. Their very cognitive in their approach. They think 

about a nonprofit's finances quite a bit. But we need to recognize in most nonprofit, most 

philanthropists, and foundations, and nonprofit staff and fundraisers recognize there are 

other factors, of course, that people weigh when making the decision to donate to a 

nonprofit, either financially or through their time.

And that, put simply, is at the heart. It be as important as the head. So we, in this project, 

wanted to see whether nonprofits that took a more emotional approach to their mission 

would then induce emotion in individuals, yielding a higher number of volunteers and also 

more donations. We consider whether that varies based on the type of emotion, positive 

or negative. And we also considered for types of nonprofits. For example, arts 

organizations versus health care organizations versus youth development, et cetera. So, 

you can go to the next slide.

So, for this study, then, we're making use of what is a incredibly significant new source of 

administrative data on organizations. And this is the release by the Internal Revenue 

Service of machine-readable nonprofit reporting forms—the Form 990—from about 2011 

to the present. Now I think here I don't need to go over the 990 and what it means, and 

all the financial information that's available on nonprofits. But what I do want to point out, 

I'd like you to note the text data that is available in the 990s.

Here, for example, you can see the brief description of the nonprofit's primary exempt 

purpose or mission. On a later page, there's the full board-approved mission statement of 

the nonprofit. So, we have a way to understand how the nonprofit views its work in terms 
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Civic Engagement as a Catalyst for Community Change: 2021 Research Grantee Dialogue 

Mobilizing And Managing Volunteers For Positive Community Change 

of its mission. And we use computational text analysis to measure use of emotion, 

positive or negative, by nonprofits in these mission statements. And then we examine the 

relationship between emotion, and volunteers, and donors' donations. And like I said, 

we're considering different types of nonprofits, arts, health, et cetera.

You can go to the next slide.

So, this is just a slide to help you see the nonprofits really do use emotion in describing 

their work. And they approach it differently, right? So here, what I've done is paired the 

mission statements for two nonprofits working in the crime and legal-related area, 

specifically protection against abuse, exploitation, and consider the first nonprofit that is 

really using a lot of negative emotion to describe its work. The Abused Women's Fund is

helping women who have been abused, battered, underestimated, unloved, shunned, 

afraid, crying out, a lot of real negative emotion.

A different nonprofit is approaching the same type of work in a much more positive 

emotional way. The Vanessa Behan Crisis Nursery is improving lives, is providing safety, 

support in an environment of unconditional love. The same pairing I'm trying to illustrate 

here in the agriculture, food, and nutrition area. One nonprofit is approaching its work 

with negative emotion, providing food to organizations that are feeding poor, distressed, 

underprivileged, versus positive emotion, providing food in a caring and respectful 

manner to those—and preserving dignity.

So very different ways of approaching work. What I don't have here are the nonprofits 

that are really using much emotion at all to describe their work. Very rational, very 

cognitive, scientific, using a lot of numbers, we serve this many people, et cetera, so not 

emotional. You can go to the next slide.

So just to briefly go over a couple of the things that we find. We do find that use of 

emotion varies quite a bit across nonprofits and types of nonprofits. So certain kinds of 

nonprofits, arts organizations, tend to use more emotion in describing their work.

Some use more positive emotions. Some use more negative emotions. Some use 

combinations of positive and negative emotion. What we find is that using positive 

emotion can increase volunteers. And this is especially true for nonprofit organizations 

that work in areas that tend to kind of bond people together, arts and culture, recreation 

and sports, youth development. Use of negative emotion does not generally increase 

volunteers, however. There are a couple of exceptions, nonprofits focused on health care 

and nonprofits focused in the civil rights area.

We also find that the combination of positive and negative emotion can be particularly 

powerful for some types of nonprofits. So, this is just one example of a study that we're 

doing here at Texas, trying to understand volunteering and nonprofits. I thought it was 

particularly interesting to share with you since it has fairly easy application for nonprofits 

who are interested in engaging and attracting volunteers.
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Civic Engagement as a Catalyst for Community Change: 2021 Research Grantee Dialogue 

Mobilizing And Managing Volunteers For Positive Community Change 

PRESENTER [ANDREA ROBLES]: Thank you, Pam. And I know you have some results with business 

and maybe I'll come back to that.

PAM PAXTON: Oh, sure.

PRESENTER [ANDREA ROBLES]: Or other people in the call might. So, I'm going to move to Jennifer. 

JENNIFER CRITTENDEN: Hi, everyone. I'm Jennifer Crittenden, Assistant Professor of Social Work and

Associate Director at the University of Maine and University of Maine Center on Aging. 

And I want to acknowledge—so the grant them going to talk about, the project I'm going 

to talk about it, is a Dissertation Award. And I do want to recognize my dissertation 

advisor, Dr. Sandra Butler, who helped me in the early phases of this work. And it has 

continued past the dissertation phase, I am I'm pleased to report.

And I also want to acknowledge the graduate students who have helped on the project 

that I'm going to talk about, including Rachel Coleman, who is still working on the project 

today and has joined us in the virtual audience. So, thank you, Rachel, for being here.

So, the title of my project is called “Juggling Multiple Roles, an Examination of Role 

Conflict among Older Adult Volunteers.” So, I want to just give you a little bit of context 

about why I decided to pursue this topic.

So, in the field of aging, we have seen a lot of demographic shifts in terms of workforce 

participation and caregiving and informal helping among older adults, with those activities 

increasing over time and increasing across our lifespan. And this raises some interesting 

questions around to what extent those activities compete with formal volunteering. So, we 

know that formal volunteering decreases as we get older, and partly that has to do with a 

variety of factors. But partly, that could be due to the competition of these other social 

roles that we fill.

So, I wanted to further unpack that and find out to what extent does role conflict or the 

stress and strain that we feel when we don't have the resources to manage all of our 

obligations, to what extent does that conflict impact our ability to engage with formal 

volunteering, really with an eye for making this an applied research project so that these 

findings could help the field to better engage our older adult volunteers. So, the reason 

we want to engage older adult volunteers is that the literature has really firmly established 

that there are multiple benefits for older adults.

So, those who volunteer tend to have better health outcomes, mental health ratings tend 

to be higher. Older adults who volunteer have higher ratings of life satisfaction. They also 

are more likely to engage in health behaviors, and they tend to live longer than those who 

do not volunteer. So it's clearly a sort of health benefit activity that we want to encourage 

older adults to be involved in. So, next slide.

So, the project was a multiphase study with three distinct phases. And we're now 

currently in the dissemination phase. The first phase, which was really the focal point of 
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Civic Engagement as a Catalyst for Community Change: 2021 Research Grantee Dialogue 

Mobilizing And Managing Volunteers For Positive Community Change 

the work, it was an RSVP volunteer survey. So, RSVP is an older adult volunteer 

program administered through AmeriCorps seniors. And through that survey, we've 

reached close to seventeen hundred older adults throughout the country, representing 55 

RSVP sites. The survey collected data, both quantitative and qualitative data. I'm going to 

give you just a 30,000-foot view. And then I have some specific results that I'll share 

during the question portion of today.

So, the research questions for that particular phase of the study were, “Does role conflict 

predict satisfaction with, participation in, and/or intention to leave the volunteer role?” And 

also, explore the compensatory strategies used by older adults to navigate world conflict. 

And then also, really look at what benefits older adults accrue in their volunteer roles that 

then can counterbalance that role conflict. So not just to the extent that it impacts 

volunteer work but how are older adults managing that role conflict.

In phase two of this study, we surveyed RSVP sites to understand their perspective from 

an organizational level, how this shows up. So, when they are engaging those volunteers 

who also work in paid employment and those that are engaging in caregiving activities 

and those who are helping in the community: how does that role conflict shows up and 

then how do they, as organizations, help to mitigate that role conflict? And then the phase

three, we took that broad-level data and we really wanted to dig down deeper. So, we 

invited programs to give us really a strategy-level overview of the things that they are 

doing, so the practices that they're putting into place in their programs that are helping 

older adults to manage those multiple role commitments. And then through the 

dissemination phase, we really try to translate those findings into materials and 

information that the field can ultimately use to support older adult volunteers. Next slide. 

So, the findings for this study—I'm going to give, again, just these broad principles. The 

first is that volunteer outcomes are related to health and role. So, what we know is that 

health is an important intervening factor that is related to volunteer participation and 

satisfaction. So, those with poor self-rated health also had reported lower levels of 

volunteer participation and satisfaction with that volunteer arrangement. And those who 

had higher numbers of roles that they were juggling, so if they were caregiving, or 

working, or otherwise helping in the community, they tended to report lower levels of 

RSVP participation. And those who experience conflict or that stress and strain related to 

those multiple roles reported lower levels of satisfaction with their volunteer experience. 

So, we certainly see that the roles that we hold in life do impact our formal volunteering. 

What we do know, though, the good news is that volunteers were able to identify the 

benefits that they received from volunteering across those other roles that they 

maintained. We also heard from both volunteers and programs that there are ways that 

they work together to manage conflict through volunteer practices, volunteer 

management practices, as well as individual volunteers having their own strategies that 

they used to help mitigate that role conflict.

And then for programs—we heard this, again, both from programs and from the 

volunteers themselves—using practices that really provide empathy and a flexible 
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Civic Engagement as a Catalyst for Community Change: 2021 Research Grantee Dialogue 

Mobilizing And Managing Volunteers For Positive Community Change 

approach are really critical to helping older adult volunteers to remain engaged in that 

volunteer work. Next slide.

So, I want to just make sure that folks know how to find—there's a wealth of information 

because we have qualitative, quantitative data from 1700 older adults, and then the 

organizational level data and findings. There is a web page that I've set up to share the 

white papers that have come out of this work, presentations, and then we've also taken 

that work and translated into tip sheets for volunteers and volunteer managers so that 

they can understand those practices that they can put into place. And the final piece that 

we're working on is a much more like a manual-style publication so that programs can 

understand how they work these types of practices into their recruitment strategies, into 

their policy manuals, and those sorts of things. And we currently have some academic 

manuscripts under prep that will go in the summer. So that is it for my broad overview.

PRESENTER [ANDREA ROBLES]: Thank you, Jennifer. And I just want to tell you the new director of 

Senior Corps is very interested in hearing more of the RSVP findings. So, I'll circle back 

with you. All right, so we heard different aspects of volunteering from our speakers. And 

the first question is, as an agency, we hope to increase volunteering, national service, 

and civic engagement in order to strengthen communities and improve lives, which, as

you know, is our mission statement. What do you see as some positive impacts for 

volunteers or organizations who sponsor volunteers, or at the community level? So, I'm 

going to start with Peter and Kei.

PETER LEVINE: I want to hear what Kei says. The one thing—I was sort of about to type this in the chat 

is—I was hoping to, a little bit, challenge the distinctions between volunteering and work 

and between the nonprofit sector and the other sectors. And so my question would be, 

“To what extent are the very interesting findings about nonprofit managers, mission 

statements, and nonprofits, and elderly volunteers, how much do they generalize about 

just people doing public work?” For example, employees of AmeriCorps on this phone 

call, or researchers at universities, or bank managers. And I think this is relevant to the 

question you just asked because it's a question about whether we should be focused on 

the nonprofit sector, and if so, why?

KEI KAWASHIMA-GINSBERG: Oh, it's a great question, Peter. I think that's actually true to folks like us 

that CIRCLE at Tufts University, which is an institution that focused exclusively on young 

people's civic development, engagement, and learning. And so when we watch young 

people and today's ways in which young people contribute to public life, there's, I think, 

far more diverse ways than what we call volunteering, at least historically. And so, some 

examples may be producing really meaningful and substantive political opinion posts on 

social media that goes to thousands of friends. Or you could think about spending a lot of 

time organizing protests so that they can improve the police force in the city the way they 

want to see the police force to be. So, there are all kinds of things that young people do 

and spend a lot of time, if not dedicate half of their life at this moment, that is not 

considered volunteering because it's not attached to a nonprofit organization. So, I think 
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Civic Engagement as a Catalyst for Community Change: 2021 Research Grantee Dialogue 

Mobilizing And Managing Volunteers For Positive Community Change 

there is some really big questions, especially when it comes to young people's innovation 

around that.

However, when I can define volunteering in that broad terminology, if you will, because 

we don't just study nonprofit volunteering, if I think about spending time with others, 

deciding what to do as a collective to make positive change in society as a definition of 

what volunteering, we do see lots of benefits on young people's development. So, for 

example, really thinking about how that can connect to a broader career network because 

that can really bring career options for especially young people who may be in 

internships. That's an opportunity, we find, is at each college, to really explore what the 

career choices are and whether they really want to go into that career. So for young 

people, that's extremely important.

The other thing that we see is I think that idea that the young people, often in a volunteer 

role, are challenged and inspired and stimulated by diverse opinions and perspectives 

because they're often going out of their regular comfort zone to a larger community, with 

regards to how much power the person that you're speaking to. They're not just your 

friends, right? They're sometimes a bridge to the professionalized world. I think some of 

us are arguing that rich should be gone and it should be just public work, no matter what 

we do or whether we're paid or not. But I think when I think about internships, that's often

the case. They're really, especially for I think about high school and college students, 

they're going on an internship to be exposed to a totally different world of professional 

expectations, more diverse perspectives than they're used to in their own network. And I 

think the idea is that they can become more informed and thoughtful civic actors as a 

result of what they're self-studying.

PRESENTER [ANDREA ROBLES]: Thank you. Whoops. Something's just going off in my house. OK, I 

will hand it over to Mark.

MARK HAGER: Thank you. Is my video jumping in there yet? No? OK, people will listen to my 

disembodied Mark Hager, I guess, here. I reflected on Andrea's question and came up 

with sort of two very different kinds of answers. The first one really didn't come out of the 

study, but maybe the study causing me to focus more on the question of sort of civic 

engagement and engagement of volunteers. And that's just the observation that our 

engagement pathways are changing and have been changing for a long time.

Robert Putnam traced the big changes back to post-world World War II. So, we're the 

better part of a century in some sort of sea changes in how we engage our communities. 

And that was more than 20 years ago that we got that Bowling Alone thesis. And I don't 

think our disengagement has really improved since that work. I think we like to think and 

build with our grandparents’ America in mind rather than thinking about where we're at 

now or what our children's America is going to look like.

So, the result is that we're always a little bit out of step in terms of what we're building in 

order to best engage our nonprofit organizations and thereby, engage our communities. 
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Civic Engagement as a Catalyst for Community Change: 2021 Research Grantee Dialogue 

Mobilizing And Managing Volunteers For Positive Community Change 

And the problem is that people are perfectly content to binge Netflix alone in their living 

rooms rather than talk to neighbors or otherwise engage their community. So, I think 

AmeriCorps can be a leader in creative thinking about how best to engage today's 

masses and the problems that we have in trying to engage our communities.

I think we—and by we, I mean academics, and general practitioners, and AmeriCorps— 

we kind of crow about the minority of people that we do engage. And we think less about 

those people that we don't. And there's a lot of people out there that are holed up in their 

living rooms, and they're the ones who can benefit most from civic engagement. I think 

we need new and improved ways to engage everyone in a changing America.

A second observation I had was what came more from the study that I talked about 

earlier. And that is that we can benefit from more of a focus on field development. And by 

that, I mean the professional field of volunteer administration. The VMC II study that I 

talked about where we reported out 2019 results recently. It tells us, again, because it's 

reinforced what we learned back in 2003, that only about a quarter of nonprofits have a 

staff person who spends at least half their time on volunteer administration.

So, to a large extent, a volunteer administration, it's avocational. Nonprofit organizations 

don't take a professional approach to volunteer administration. So that finding is sort of a 

poor reflection on the readiness of U.S. nonprofits to provide good experiences for 

volunteers or to maximize the benefits from volunteers and their organizations. So, I'd say

we have a long ways to go in developing the infrastructure of volunteer support. I think 

that AmeriCorps can be a leader on that front.

And when we put out those 2003 results on the original VMC study, AmeriCorps, or 

Corporation for National Community Service, was saying maybe we can use national 

service volunteers to be more involved in volunteer administration. Well, they did. And 

they're still doing that today. I think we can do things like that. And I we can do a lot more 

to lead in developing infrastructure and doing field development so that we can best use 

volunteers to engage our communities and provide better experiences for those 

volunteers.

PRESENTER [ANDREA ROBLES]: Thanks, Mark. And I'm sure people will have lots of questions for you 

when we split up into groups. Pam?

PAM PAXTON: Sure. So, in thinking about what are the positive impacts of, say, AmeriCorps on 

communities, I was thinking about a different piece of research I did for AmeriCorps, 

which was looking at the influence of civic infrastructure, specifically, again, nonprofit 

organizations on community subjective well-being. So, we used Twitter to measure 

subjective well-being and looked at positive emotion, and engagement, and positive 

relationships, as well as negative emotion, disengagement, and negative relationships. 

And what we found was that nonprofits buffer against negative emotion and 

disengagement. And only in the case of engagement do we see positive effects—that 

nonprofits are affecting engagement. But generally, in communities, if you think about 
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Civic Engagement as a Catalyst for Community Change: 2021 Research Grantee Dialogue 

Mobilizing And Managing Volunteers For Positive Community Change 

subjective well-being, which we view as very important, like happiness, gross domestic 

happiness, and those various things, nonprofits and civic infrastructure are really helping 

buffer against some of the negative, against negative emotion and disengagement, et 

cetera.

And so things that support civic infrastructure—nonprofit organizations, et cetera, like 

AmeriCorps—that's an excellent public policy lever to influence communities by 

supporting civic infrastructure and protecting communities' subjective well-being.

PRESENTER [ANDREA ROBLES]: Thank you. And I don't know if you want to put in the chat the article?

PAM PAXTON: I should say, all of these are published at this point, I think. And so, I'm happy to provide 

links to any of these studies, yes, absolutely.

PRESENTER [ANDREA ROBLES]: Thank you. Jennifer?

JENNIFER CRITTENDEN: All right, so I'll start with the societal piece, which has not so much grown out 

of this research, specifically, and then I'll point to a couple of research findings. So, I think 

in the field of gerontology, one thing that we're really talking about right now is the impact 

that COVID has had in increasing ageism in the United States. And so, the more that we 

can engage older adult volunteers in really meaningful and public ways, I think that we 

will combat, potentially, that ageism that has kind of been left behind or will be left behind 

in COVID's wake. So, I encourage volunteer managers and nonprofits to think about their 

role in that particular issue.

And then kind of on an individual level, the data that was collected from the RSVP 

volunteer study really shows that, even though we define these sort of boundaries around

life roles—caregiving, working, volunteering—the benefits are fluid across those roles. 

And so, I think volunteering offers benefits directly to those volunteers with things like 

socialization, personal growth, positive emotional benefits, cognitive benefits. These are 

all things that volunteers discuss in their survey responses. They also talked about what 

we would call kind of role-specific benefits.

So, for caregivers, in particular, they talked about how volunteering brings a sense of 

respite. So, if we think about the tremendous growth that we've seen in family caregiving, 

volunteering has the potential to be a caregiver intervention, if you will. It's a chance for 

folks to connect with other people outside the home, a chance for them to get away, and 

a chance for stress relief, which is sort of interesting, because we think about caregivers 

as being a really busy, sort of stressed-out cadre of people. But in fact, those that have 

connected with volunteering reported really positive experiences from that work.

Folks also talked about gaining new skills that they use either in their caregiving or in 

their paid work. So, as we look at whether that's re-entering the workforce or remaining 

within the workforce, volunteering has the ability to give older adults those skills or help 

them to retool for those opportunities. So, those are some very specific examples of 

what's grown out of the research piece.
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Civic Engagement as a Catalyst for Community Change: 2021 Research Grantee Dialogue 

Mobilizing And Managing Volunteers For Positive Community Change 

And then of course, we hear from the RSVP programs and other nonprofits that older 

adult volunteers have been a mainstay of their volunteer work. And that's important that 

they continue to recruit and sustain that volunteer workforce. So, I see that as a key 

driver, perhaps, with this work.

PRESENTER [ANDREA ROBLES]: Thanks. And just moving on to the second one, we have about six 

minutes before we go into our groups. So, can you give us, and again, thinking of your 

research, whether it's what we've sponsored or other research you've done, can you give 

us some examples from your research on how you would better mobilize and sustain 

volunteers, and if you have anything to say about how you think that might have changed 

before and after COVID? And again, we'll start with Peter and Kei.

KEI KAWASHIMA-GINSBERG: Is it okay to go first, Peter? 

PETER LEVINE: I think we'll start with Kei between the two of us.

KEI KAWASHIMA-GINSBERG: Am I going? OK. So I saw with my work—I think I mentioned this a little 

bit earlier—has been a lot with engaging and sustaining teachers and educators who are 

coming, again, unpaid to learn something, and I've learned quite a bit about how to 

sustain people engaged in a specific mission, which again, I think is why it applies to 

volunteering management. One of the things that we learned quite a bit—because we 

worked before and through COVID and partly in the digital learning environment. And 

what we learned a lot in that was, essentially, the importance of relationship and, again, 

the power sharing.

So, the part of the relationship part really has to do with how people that are doing the same kind of work 

but through a different context and have different identities and priorities can really bond 

on the idea that you are not the only one doing the work. It was especially important in 

the digital environment, where teachers often felt very alone. They didn't even see their

students, which is why they teach. So they're often talking to Zoom. It's a really difficult 

time. It's really important for the teachers to really feel like, I'm not alone trying to improve 

this thing.

It's really hard, especially in this political climate, to teach social studies and civics. And that was really 

important. The other part that I emphasize on agency is this idea that the teachers, like 

some of the bosses and managers that work with volunteers, are in the position of 

authority. But at the same time, the context in which they worked really mattered. So, if 

the teachers or volunteer managers are not feeling like they can make some decisions or 

they have a voice or agency within their own workplace or in a particular context, they 

also have a hard time sharing that power.

So, when Peter asked, what should we do together question, the teacher also needs to be able to ask 

that question in an authentic way and then have that question asked of them by the 

people that they're working with or for. So those are two things I'll just lift up.

PETER LEVINE: Great. I guess along similar lines but in a different sector, I might just mention that, at 
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Civic Engagement as a Catalyst for Community Change: 2021 Research Grantee Dialogue 

Mobilizing And Managing Volunteers For Positive Community Change 

least the strategy of cities at service has been to try to convert sort of episodic service, 

defined as not getting paid, as doing work that you're not paid for, into more intense 

problem solving. So in which the city officials in the cities of service and the volunteer, the 

contributors of free time, see themselves as working together on the same project. I 

mean, I think this is consistent with what Kei was saying about teachers.

And so one change there is to hold everybody really accountable. Too often, you think of the volunteer as 

somebody who just should get a sticker on take home because they showed up for a few 

hours. But if the volunteer is there because they think that the streets are dangerous and 

they want to help, then are the streets getting less dangerous? And what are the means 

you would use to make them less dangerous? And are the volunteer hours actually 

helpful?

I did some work—strategic planning work—and a little evaluation in cities in service. I can't speak so 

much to what data would show about the results. But I think, at least in conception, the 

idea would be to shift the person who just thinks, I'll give a few hours of time to help, into 

somebody who's sort of sharing an responsibility for problem solving, and potentially 

bringing their whole life into it too. So if the person has a day job, that maybe their day job 

can be part of solving the problem, as well as just their after-hours work.

PRESENTER [ANDREA ROBLES]: Thanks. Mark?

MARK HAGER: Andrea asks, “What can we say about mobilization of volunteers in a COVID world or a 

post-pandemic world?” And I want to give a pretty brief answer to what I think is a really 

exciting question. Because that question has sort of been front-of-mind for me in this sort 

of supplemental project I'm working on. It was the primary project that brought me back to 

AmeriCorps, where we were doing that sort of that snapshot of what volunteer 

management capacity looked like in the pre-pandemic age. But it was this supplement, 

thank you, AmeriCorps, that allowed me to sort of take advantage of the pandemic and 

see where we're at.

My starting point with this sort of second project is an observation that the future for the country and for 

nonprofit organizations, and especially engagement of volunteers, is a technological one. 

It'll have more virtual and remote connection than we've seen in the past. And COVID 

really brought that to a head. This is an opportunity for volunteer administration, but it's 

also a challenge. And we need to confront that and see how we can best take advantage 

of that.

So, this TEVA study that I'm working on right now—we had a survey and now we're doing focus groups— 

it's documenting how volunteer administrators engaged in technology when the pandemic 

hit, but also, and I think probably most importantly, the challenges that they faced in using 

and adapting the technologies. Sometimes the available tech is bad. Sometimes tech 

support in organizations is bad. Sometimes, too often, our managers, who are mostly not 

digital natives, are just not adept in using technology.

So, if our technology if our future is a technological one, then I think we need to seriously consider how to 
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Civic Engagement as a Catalyst for Community Change: 2021 Research Grantee Dialogue 

Mobilizing And Managing Volunteers For Positive Community Change 

smooth the marriage of computer applications and social media to volunteer 

administration. We really need to do it. Thanks.

PRESENTER [ANDREA ROBLES]: Thank you. Pam?

PAM PAXTON: Sure. Well, as for the question of how we could better mobilize or sustain volunteers 

under U.S.—Rita mentioned the Vista study—so I'll say VISTA. We did look at VISTA and 

used some data that we got from AmeriCorps to link to those 990s, the administrative 

data. And we did a match design. So we looked at organizations that had VISTA and very 

similar organizations that did not. And we looked two years out and we found that, I 

mean, VISTAs are doing what they're supposed to do, right?

They're building capacity at the organizations that are increasing volunteers, a little evidence for 

increasing donations. I won't go into this in great detail. I did do a webinar, an 

AmeriCorps webinar on this, so I'm sure that recording is available somewhere. And it 

goes into a lot of detail about the study. But I do think VISTA, like I said for the last 

question, AmeriCorps and AmeriCorps VISTA has an important role to play here in 

thinking about volunteering and civic infrastructure in communities, and certainly, I think, 

in terms of recovering community after COVID. So, yeah, I'll put a I'll put a link to the 

study in the chat as well.

PRESENTER [ANDREA ROBLES]: Thanks. Jennifer?

JENNIFER CRITTENDEN: Yeah, so I'll emphasize two points. The first being one key takeaway is to 

emphasize how volunteering can help to translate into the paid work environment, so how 

can we help people transition or retool. Again, I think that will increasingly be important, 

especially for older adults who have been disproportionately impacted by COVID-related 

layoffs and job impacts. So I think that will be a key piece. And to echo some of Mark's 

points I think technology will be important as well.

So we've heard from volunteers—this was pre-pandemic when the survey was conducted—but we need 

to really change the how, when, where of volunteering if we're going to be flexible and 

engage people who are working, or caregiving, or doing other things. And so one of the 

ways that we could do that is through virtual volunteering, and I don't know that we have

any solid strategies for doing that. There are certainly some promising models and things 

that have cropped up. And certainly, as the RSVP programs have had to adapt during 

COVID, I think there's a lot to learn there as well. But I do think that the future will be 

shaped by technology and flexibility, and how and when we do our work. And that 

includes volunteer work.

PRESENTER [ANDREA ROBLES]: Thank you. You all bring up some great points, and I've been jotting 

them down. I do want to give everyone an opportunity to be able to speak with all of you. 

So I will ask to put us into our breakout rooms. And we'll head back at 2:45. So, Larisa? 

OK, thank you. If everyone could just join the room, we'll see you soon.

Everyone's been participating. I also want to make sure, if we're not looking at the chat and I haven't 
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Civic Engagement as a Catalyst for Community Change: 2021 Research Grantee Dialogue 

Mobilizing And Managing Volunteers For Positive Community Change 

answered some specific questions, just know that ICF is recording these, and I'd be 

happy to send them to the speakers and have them respond.

But I was just wondering, we've been placed in just a couple of different rooms. I'd like to give you a 

chance to just respond to something you've heard today, either from the panelists or from 

the chat room, and just your takeaway from that, but also maybe next steps that you find 

interesting in terms of volunteering research. And we'll start again with Peter and Kei.

PETER LEVINE: I was just actually sort of typing something in the chat kind of in response to something 

Anneliese from Virginia said. So maybe I'll just use this space to say it. Well, we were 

talking about ways of addressing—in part, we were talking about ways of addressing 

young people's reasonable and well-grounded concerns about volunteering, savior 

complex and whether they are really the right people to address social problems or 

whether volunteer service is a way of addressing social problems.

And I don't want to speak for anyone else, but Anneliese brought up that they were learning it from kind of 

the environmental movement, which offers some other models. And I was just thinking, 

riffing off her thought, that the environmental movement often demands a lot of scientific 

rigor in the investigation of the problem, which we sometimes don't do with social 

problems in volunteering. So we don't say, well, why aren't kids reading, in the way that 

environmentalists would say, why is this ecosystem failing.

But the other thing is it's got a different model of stewardship instead of service, which might be pretty 

powerful. I don't know if that's where Anneliese was going. We were in the middle of that 

conversation when the breakout time ended. But that was just my response. I can yield 

my time to Anneliese if he wants to add anything.

AUDIENCE: No, I think that was a great kind of way to think about that thought, of like, how do we look at 

volunteers in a stewardship.

PETER LEVINE: It would be stewardship not just of nature but of the social community as well.

KEI KAWASHIMA-GINSBERG: I love that. I am really processing a lot of what I heard today. So I'm 

actually going to yield my time.

PRESENTER [ANDREA ROBLES]: OK, Mark?

MARK HAGER: Thank you. I don't have concluding remarks prepared. What I'll say, I guess, is that I'm 

excited—I said that earlier—about this supplemental work that's going on because it 

really allowed me to take advantage of a very contemporary, dare I say, hot question of

how we engage our volunteers in a pandemic and in a post-pandemic world. So I have 

this great data, of survey data now, hundreds of people in focus groups that will allow me 

to work through a fall sabbatical semester on a book on this question. So I hope to be 

able to make some big and hopefully influential contributions on this question of 

technology engagement and how we work with our communities and with our volunteers. 

Separate from that, though, is an opportunity now to talk more with our practice 
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Civic Engagement as a Catalyst for Community Change: 2021 Research Grantee Dialogue 

Mobilizing And Managing Volunteers For Positive Community Change 

communities. There's half a dozen good outlets alive, CCVA, regional volunteer 

administration organizations, to talk with about what we're finding. So I'm excited to move 

more into a listening mode, saying, here's what I found. Let's hear what you tell me about 

what I'm saying. And so I can get that much smarter by sharing what I can with the world 

and hearing what they have to say back.

PRESENTER [ANDREA ROBLES]: Thank you. Pam?

PAM PAXTON: I also didn't really have any closing remarks. So I think I'll just take the opportunity to 

thank AmeriCorps for funding research like this because I think not only the very policy 

relevant research and the extremely relevant—but also the basic research kind of undergirding our understanding of pro-social behavior and civic infrastructure and social capital 

and declines, like Mark was talking about earlier. And there's a lot more that we need to 

know. And I mean, I care passionately about this, obviously. I've been studying it my 

whole career. But I just think it's really wonderful that you're funding research that is 

relevant, both to your agency, but also generally. And so, yeah, so I just thought I'd take 

the time to say thank you.

PETER LEVINE: [INAUDIBLE]

PRESENTER [ANDREA ROBLES]: And thank you to all of you for taking it on. [LAUGHS] 

PETER LEVINE: And it builds a community too, which has been great.

PRESENTER [ANDREA ROBLES]: Yes, it's been great. It's been great. I wish I could see you all in 

person. And so Jennifer, I don't want to leave you out.

JENNIFER CRITTENDEN: Just to echo all that's been said, I am, of course, still processing. There's so 

many great ideas. I'm curious to see where volunteering goes in a post-pandemic world. I 

know we've lost many older adult volunteers during the pandemic because of safety 

concerns. So how do we re-engage those folks that we've lost or people who may have 

some initial trepidation about re-entering volunteering? So I'm very interested from that 

angle. I'm interested definitely in the technology, to see where that goes and see how 

organizations build their capacity and how volunteers are engaged through virtual 

volunteering.

And echo the thank you to AmeriCorps and to Senior Corps, in particular. I will put the link to my study 

there in the chat box. So, I really hope that volunteer managers, if you are one or you 

know some, feel free to share that. There is some tip sheets that are really meant for 

folks who are doing that day-to-day work.

PRESENTER [ANDREA ROBLES]: And I just want to close with Peter, your call to action and what 

should we do as, not just an agency but as a community, as a country, as a global world.

And I think we will be thinking of that for some time to come. So I don't know if Mary can 

get on because she's in that middle of a storm. Mary?

MARY HYDE: We'll see how long I last. Can you hear and see me? 
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Civic Engagement as a Catalyst for Community Change: 2021 Research Grantee Dialogue 

Mobilizing And Managing Volunteers For Positive Community Change 

PRESENTER [ANDREA ROBLES]: Yes, we can.

MARY HYDE: OK. Let me please say this before I lose everything. Really, thank you for taking the time to 

learn with us and to share with us today. I know I appreciated the opportunity to 

transcend the echo chamber of my own mind and to tap into the collective wisdom that I 

feel has been represented here today and over the course of the last two days. I also 

want to thank ICF for their invaluable support for this convening. And thank you to our 

colleagues in the Office of External Affairs for helping us get the word out.

Thank you to our AmeriCorps colleagues for taking time to learn with us. And of course, thank you to all 

of the panelists for sharing what you are learning with us. I think, not only to Pam 

Paxton's point, will the agency benefit, but it is my sincere belief that our country will 

benefit from the knowledge you're building. So, with that, thank you. Have a great 

weekend, everyone. And I'm going to close my window before the electricity goes out.