Connecting Volunteers to Community Service through the Internet in Rural West Virginia. By Helen Minogue Commission for National and Community Service, Charleston, West Virginia . Abstract This paper describes a three year project initiative piloting the concept of county volunteer offices and a web based interactive database of volunteers and agencies to support these offices in rural West Virginia. Use of the Internet overcomes the traditional obstacles to progress in West Virginia: Funds, geography (mountainous region), and a relatively sparse population. The project Connect West Virginia attempts to link volunteers to community service both in their local hometowns and also to service far away through virtual volunteering. Means to do this include using a commercially available interactive web based software and the construction of we b sites representing each of the 55 counties in the state. Local county no n profit agencies nest the county volunteer office web site in their own or if none exists one is created. Future plans for this network include sourcing and distributing donated goods and services to relieve poverty in isolated parts of the state and to promote the use of Americorps Vista - a federal volunteer service program. Learning Objectives: (1) The advantage of using the Internet to recruit volunteers (2) Attitudes to the new technology among our stakeholders in this project (3) The future of the project 96 How we see the Internet changing volunteer recruitment and attitudes toward community service. Volunteerism in West Virginia West Virginia has the second lowest median household income and one of the highest child poverty rates in the United States. In forums - (community gatherings brought together for the purpose of framing a social issue for discussion); across West Virginia, volunteerism was cited as a meaningful way to address poverty. "A number of forum participants identified opportunities in their communities to "make a difference" in the lives of others, particularly children". (Making Ends Meet, 2001) Attitudes about volunteerism vary widely. The notion of Community Service is a positive one and at the Commission for National and Community service in Charleston where the author is employed; we seek to use service as a way to solve social problems. The following illustrates how powerfully volunteerism and service can be in addressing social issues of our day. In Nicholas County, West Virginia a couple saw how few people had health insurance and how people would discourage their children from playing school sports and would postpone health checkups. They applied for a grant from the United States Department of Health and Human services to establish a free health clinic. They recruited volunteer physicians, nurses, pharmacists as well as volunteers to chase up donations of drugs and funds. They identified a place to run the clinic - namely the back of a local grocery store. The clinic is an attempt to address the problem of people who fall through the cracks in terms of health insurance - those who make too much money to qualify for the United States free health insurance program Medicare and those who cannot afford private health insurance. This clinic will be invaluable to the people of Nicholas County. It is addressing a very serious American problem. Because of the selfless effort s of this couple people will be able to have health checkups and afford medication they need. Children will be able to play school sports and mothers will be able to get care during their pregnancies. There are many example s like this in West Virginia where a few local people have marshaled resources to create a solution to address a problem. The Commission for National and Community Service, part of the governor's cabinet in West Virginia w anted to create a clearinghouse and a network of communication to give such local volunteer effort better access to statewide resources and to be able to find and share best practices in community development. The volunteer support network was named :Connect West Virginia Initialization of the Project. Providing 245,000 for start up costs the Commission invited four West Virginia Counties to become part of the Volunteer Connection Network. The first four were Wood, Wetzel, Marion and Nicholas Counties. Their respective non profit hosting organizations comprised of a Volunteer Action Center, a family social service organization, a state college and a senior volunteer agency. Since the initial start up funds were small and could in no way provide long term staff support for the project the idea of looking at developing a n on line network was considered. It made sense to have information such a s best practices online as well as grant resources available and information on where to find similar work being done around the country. Providing a clearinghouse of volunteer opportunities was more of a challenge. To post up the volunteer opportunities for ultimately 55 counties in the state (we would start with four) and to have the local agencies own their information and be able to access it as well as a separate main site for the clearinghouse was the challenge. As a state agency too, funds are very limited so a custom made program was out of the question. We had to find a solution with what was available on the market. Establishing the technology In the very small volunteer management database niche market there w as one software vendor producing a product close to our needs. This company produced a standard Microsoft based database application for managing volunteers. It included timesheets, training calendars, recognition and award s reminders - everything one would need to manage a cadre of volunteers. The product was developed originally for in house volunteer management e.g. Hospitals. One of the reasons we purchased the software was because the v endor told us that they would release within a year an edition that would e nable an agency to list volunteer jobs on the Internet. With the budget of 245,000 per county each sponsoring organization of the project purchased this volunteer managing software. In February 2001 the posting on the Internet edition was available. By then we had 5 new sites - all community development agencies and one school district. Each county coordinator from their desk can upload community volunteer jobs onto the vendors92 server - almost any information they have in their databases can be posted up to the server at the touch of a button. This me ans that local community volunteer jobs are fresh and are regularly updated . It also means that unlike most clearinghouses where the burden of updati ng information falls on one person. The counties are responsible for their own information and the clearinghouse just links to these. The result is a wider net of volunteer jobs posted with more detail and more meaning for individual communities. The main site links to the county sites as well as listing grant resourc es for non profits in a wide range of categories, virtual volunteering ideas, links and best practices for non profits. Applications of the Internet for Volunteerism Virtual Volunteering is slowly launching itself as the 20th century way to volunteer. Examples of virtual volunteering include ment oring on line, writing a grant and e-mailing it to a charity, or developing web pages for non profit organizations.
Virtual Volunteering is the answer for people with busy schedules but wh o want to volunteer. People can develop job skills by virtually volunteeri ng through writing, developing web sites or by undertaking research. In do ing this, people will break down fears they have about using a computer and develop skills they need to have for jobs by honing them first as voluntee rs. The simple expedient of listing volunteer opportunities in the local com munity firstly makes it more likely that things will get done because someo ne went through the discipline of writing a job description. Because peop e know that the jobs will be posted up the job descriptions tend to be well written. Providing a profile of the work that needs to get done in a comm unity educates the community about the needs of the people and explodes ste reotypes and false assumptions about community resources and lack thereof. The listing of community service opportunities in a given community makes it more likely work will get done and that better outreach is achieved. Li sting the volunteer job opportunities gives the community a feeling of conn ectedness and finally the very act of assessment of what needs there are in the community gives people a sense of ownership. Attitudes and Adoption towards and of the Internet as a recruiting tool. Following are the per capita personal income statistics of the nine counties where we adopted the project. Clearly, one of the biggest barrier s to the project is the cost of computer ownership. This however, is not a n absolute barrier as the county volunteer coordinators can be contacted by phone or in person at the local non profit hosting agency. The Internet can be accessed at most local libraries.
Source: United States of Commerce, Bureau of Economic Analysis Regional Accounts Data. State Bearfacts for 1998 - 99 Attitudes toward the use of the Internet as a tool to resolving community problems differ. In one county volunteers are primarily used to help support various economic initiatives and micro enterprise. The attitudes towards the Internet are mostly hopeful that Ecommerce will turn around very economically depressed areas; that the Internet will enable pockets of WestVirginia to compete where they have never before. Marketing products locally is very restricted because of road infrastructure and population size. Small twisty, winding, mountainous roads lead from the interstate corridorto several principal West Virginia towns. In some communities there is an expectation that the volunteer jobs posted on the Internet will re-energize the community that may have become fragmented because of the emergence ofmalls at the expense of main street. With some counties it is hoped that the mobilization of people around community needs might help address an even more serious need 96 the ongoing economic depression and the unrelenting migration of young people because of the inability of the state to bring in living wages. In one county almost 30 signatures were procured in support of the project. One of the poorest counties and quite inaccessible the expectation is that because of the Internet support, project resources such as donated goods will come into that county. For most counties the use of the Internet and how it will support volunteer recruitment efforts and support community service is something that will evolve over time. The Future of the Project The use of the Internet supports our ability to extend the use of vo lunteerism and to re-invent volunteerism so that it can be part of the solu tion to the state's economic development problems which are compounded by limited road infrastructure, limited financial and migrating intellectual resources. I believe that the Internet will change the way people think about community service in West Virginia. I think that the structure of our volunteer listings on the Internet will cause people to define social problems in new ways i.e. Volunteer job descriptions will need to be more detailed and thorough and will also be more ambitious in the skills expected. I believe that the online posting service available to many non profits, will yield a sharing of resources and will garner education among the non profi ts about the types of need in West Virginia and the available resources to address those needs. I believe that once the Connect WV site (www.connectwv.org) is well public ized in West Virginia we will be a door to beyond the state for many non pr ofits who may not have considered applying for a grant beyond state lines o r communicating with non profits doing similar work in other states. We ar e very open to change and to answering our client demand as our service evolves using the Internet. References:
|