JUN 7 It’s no secret that employers have struggled with workforce issues over the past year — first with a massive loss of workers spurred by an economic downtown amid the COVID-19 pandemic, and more recently, with filling employment vacancies as the economy rebounds and pandemic restrictions are lessened. But those same forces have conspired […]
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JUN 7
It’s no secret that employers have struggled with workforce issues over the past year — first with a massive loss of workers spurred by an economic downtown amid the COVID-19 pandemic, and more recently, with filling employment vacancies as the economy rebounds and pandemic restrictions are lessened.
But those same forces have conspired even more dramatically against nonprofit agencies, many of whom have been faced with a dramatic uptick in demand for services, while at the same time, the number of volunteers — the lifeblood of most nonprofits’ operations — plummeted, with pandemic-related restrictions on in-person contacts.
So, when wage-paying businesses can’t find employees, how can nonprofits expect to find volunteers willing to work without compensation?
For Erin Kurt, senior vice president of Junior Achievement of Eastern Iowa in Cedar Rapids, the service world turned upside down March 2020 with the onset of the pandemic. In fact, she said she wasn’t sure if the entire organization’s functions would be fundamentally impacted, since Junior Achievement’s mission – educating students in grades K-12 about entrepreneurship, work readiness and financial literacy — depends on experiential, hands-on programs, presented by volunteers in an in-person classroom setting.
“Starting last March, everything stopped for us,” Ms. Kurt said. “We did modified online [programs] for that last month or two of school, and then we went into the fall thinking, ‘OK, this has to be turning around at some point.’ But the schools in our area — not only were they figuring out how to educate students during a pandemic, but here in the Cedar Rapids/Marion area, we had the derecho effect as well. So, we really didn’t get a grasp on what the schools needed, or were able to do this year, until probably the October, December or January timeframe, whereas normally we know before August. So, even trying to determine our volunteer needs was very delayed.”
That uncertainty was particularly impactful for an organization like Junior Achievement, Ms. Kurt said, because the group’s entire mission is predicated on engaging community volunteers and pairing them with area school districts.
In a typical year, Ms. Kurt said, Junior Achievement would have a roster of around 1,300 volunteers visiting classrooms and presenting business-related curricula throughout Eastern Iowa. By contrast, she said JA started the school year with as few as 30 volunteers and expects to end the year with about 300 after a “big push” during the year. Of those 300, Ms. Kurt said she’s not even sure how many of those volunteers will return to JA in the fall, since many were JA newcomers offering their presentations virtually, rather than in person.
CommUnity Crisis Services and Food Bank in Iowa City faced a different set of volunteer challenges as the pandemic took hold, based partly on the demographics of the group’s volunteer base, said Nicole Kilmer, the organization’s marketing and communications director.
“Our food bank saw a decrease in volunteers for several reasons,” she said. “Prior to COVID, our volunteer pool was mostly students and retired individuals who were considered high risk. Having said that, we also had to reduce the amount of people at our original food bank at 1121 S. Gilbert Court in Iowa City [because] that building had a limited amount of space for volunteers and clients. At that location, we were fortunate to have AmeriCorps members, as well as some individuals in the community to come in and help.”
As the group’s food bank services returned to client choice shopping — a service suspended in the early months of the pandemic — the group moved its food bank to an 11,000-square-foot space at the Pepperwood Plaza. At that location, Ms. Kilmer noted, “we are able to be more socially distanced, which also meant we needed more volunteers to be able to run operations each day. We were able to receive funding to increase staff with temporary staff, and since people have been getting vaccinated, we have seen stability within our volunteer numbers. Quite a few of our pre-COVID volunteers have started to return, and we continue to see that number increase.”
The two groups’ volunteer stories are far from unique. A November 2020 study conducted by Fidelity Charitable found that the COVID-19 pandemic drastically increased demand for many nonprofits’ services, while sharply diminishing their volunteer workforce and changing the ways that any remaining volunteers can serve. According to the study, 66% of volunteers had decreased the amount of time they were volunteering during the pandemic or stopped volunteering altogether.
The report also indicated that 65% of those who continued volunteering engaged mostly in virtual or remote volunteer activities, versus just 17% who did their work remotely pre-pandemic. And 64% of donors indicated they didn’t know where they would go to find virtual volunteering opportunities.
Yet like most large-scale crises, the pandemic has also provided learning opportunities for nonprofits — new ways to recruit and engage volunteers, keep contact with them and expand volunteer networks. Ms. Kurt compared the current recovery period for nonprofit agencies to the recovery of the Corridor after the devastating 2008 flood.
“Look at all the benefits that have come out of that in the end, now that we’re distant from it,” she said. “Necessity is the mother of invention. We learned to make things work. We’ve had to change, and we’ve had to change quickly. That doesn’t mean you have to get rid of [the changes] when things go back to normal. We’re going to see an evolution. I think in-person is still going to be primary for us. But we have new opportunities now that we wouldn’t have imagined even two years ago.”
NEWSMAKERS UPDATE
Challenges continue for organizations looking for volunteers
Challenges remain for the volunteer community, and those challenges have even extended to the agencies that help coordinate volunteers for nonprofit organizations, such as United Way of East Central Iowa (UWECI).
“Looking at an aggregate, there’s a behavior change,” said Kayla Paulson, UWECI’s senior manager of community resource and volunteer engagement. “For 18 months, a lot of individuals have not been volunteering. Even here at United Way, we haven’t been able to do our Volunteers on Tap, which is an impactful happy hour that brings individuals together to learn about a new agency. We do the same with Coffee for a Cause. We haven’t been able to pull those groups together because it might not be responsible bringing 100 people into a shared space that don’t commonly interact in the same circles. Those are some of the pieces where that new volunteer recruitment has been affected, so they’re not getting that opportunity to lean in with an agency and do more.”
While precise volunteering numbers are tough in general, Iowa volunteers are “a very mature crowd,” Ms. Paulson said. “Some of them might not be comfortable doing virtual (volunteering), but even for those that are comfortable, the reason they volunteered was that human interaction. When you hear the paid workforce say ‘I miss having in-person meetings, it’s a different connection,’ It’s the same thing with volunteering.”
