It’s a New (Old) Day for Volunteerism: Crowdsourcing Social Change - NPQ - Nonprofit Quarterly

It’s a New (Old) Day for Volunteerism: Crowdsourcing Social Change - NPQ - Nonprofit Quarterly: ’m struck by the sense that today’s volunteer mobilization challenges are not that different from those which many organizations have faced for at least the last quarter century. My first in-depth exploration of volunteerism was in the mid-1980s—the result of seeing a worrisome decline in volunteer participation in an international youth-serving organization I worked for. In many of our national programs, the numbers of volunteers were dropping, but, more troubling, staff expectations were dropping even faster. A small group of staff from several different countries formed a short-term task force to study the situation. We tried to understand the cause of the decline, and also looked for exemplary programs around the world that were growing their volunteer bases.