Adult volunteers aged 55+ often have strong yet diverse professional backgrounds. As you begin a volunteer program, it’s best to channel that talent and tailor efforts for your particular program.
A recent National Council on Aging Webinar, How to Put Together a Successful Volunteer Training Curriculum for 50+ Leadership Volunteers, tells you how. In it, Ann Curtice Rich, executive director of Chicago Life Opportunities Initiative (CLOI), and Kim Pavlock, creator of and mentor with CLOI’s Count Me In! Program, shared their training approach.
Over the course of a year, CLOI provided leadership training for older adult volunteers — former nonprofit executives, strategic planning consultants, and more — so those volunteers could identify nonprofits’ organizational needs and fill those needs with other older adult volunteers.
The initial two-day training came from the Community Resource Network, a program created by the Points of Light Foundation. It had these components:
1. Understanding Volunteering: Statistics and trends, volunteers’ motivation, organizational readiness.
2. Planning Your Volunteer Program and Engaging Staff: Organizational needs assessments, writing a purpose statement, appropriate roles for volunteers, budget worksheet, program planning.
3. Recruiting and Placing Volunteers: Position descriptions, marketing messages and recruitment strategies, and screening applicants.
4. Training Volunteers: Identifying needs and designing, delivering, and assessing training.
5. Supervising and Recognizing Volunteers: Defining and communicating expectations, guiding and supporting volunteers, and recognizing them.
6. Evaluating your Volunteer Program: Deciding what to track, collecting data, and applying results.
CLOI supplemented this training with an additional six weeks of training, during which mentors and nonprofits generated training topics, such as these:
Leadership Training covered how to be a consultant or business coach — what to do during the first meeting with the nonprofit directors and how to set priorities, expectations, and goals for success — plus team-building exercises.
Just In Time Training was additional training with internal and external resources from throughout the city, such as volunteer managers from the Salvation Army and American Red Cross. Volunteer managers discussed, from their perspective, the experience of using older adult volunteers. This training also covered how to think about volunteer roles differently and identify leadership-level opportunities, how to create position descriptions and recruit, and how to get staff buy-in for these volunteers.
Monthly meetings offered opportunities for mentors and nonprofits to interact with one another and share their experiences, separately and together, and opened greater opportunities for program learning.
Here are the Top 10 Lessons Learned:
1. Create an environment of trust and openness where everyone’s opinions are valued.
2. Encourage the sharing of ideas so that everyone can learn from each other.
3. Discourage the conversation from being dominated by one or two people.
4. Facilitate the discussion and get out of the way — allow trainees to share their experiences and train themselves.
5. Be creative and flexible. This is a relatively new field; there are no right or wrong ways of doing it and everyone is in a difference place.
6. Training takes longer to plan and implement than you think!
7. Utilize community resources to help with training.
8. Encourage good communication — talking about what’s working and what’s not on a regular basis fosters trust and mutual respect.
9. Leave egos at the door.
10. Be open to all feedback and implement suggestions as much as possible.
What training programs have you used with success? Please share your ideas with us in the comments!
Leading By Example 