By Rosa Beltre, El Barrio, Cleveland, OH
When a small community-based organization has limited revenue and an overextended staff, it is time to think about volunteers—committed individuals who can help support the organization in ways beyond financial. Volunteers can make an important and noticeable impact in how community-based organizations function when used to the best of their potential. However, it’s a challenge for these organizations to meaningfully involve their volunteers so that they are able to receive the maximum benefit of the volunteers’ skills and knowledge.
El Barrio, a Workforce Development Center of Excellence of the West Side Ecumenical Ministries in Cleveland, Ohio and an Affiliate of NCLR, has figured out the magic formula for meaningful corporate partner volunteer engagement. El Barrio has been extremely successful in the last five years in engaging their corporate partners to volunteer for the organization. Not only does El Barrio gain from their skills and knowledge, the volunteers and corporate partners also receive a high return of investment on their committed time. El Barrio has established an extremely rigorous volunteer engagement process that has yielded positive returns.
El Barrio’s model is based on constant communication, making corporate partners aware of the organization’s needs, and ensuring that the corporate volunteers consider themselves part of the organization. El Barrio ensures that corporate volunteers are vested in the program, in the mission of the organization, and in the mission of the companies they work with. They do this by conducting a brainstorming session together with the volunteers to identify volunteers’ strengths and El Barrio’s needs. This ensures that each party is aware of what is required and can come together to plan activities and work plans around it.
Other best practices utilized by El Barrio include:
1. Defined time commitment. El Barrio ensures that each volunteer for the organization is aware of the time commitment—how many hours per week, when during the week, and the consistency of the schedule. An example schedule: Wednesday morning from 9:00 to 10:00 a.m. for the next four weeks. This ensures that the individual and the corporation are aware of the time commitment to El Barrio.
2. Volunteer retention. As with most organizations, El Barrio had trouble retaining volunteers. To overcome this, El Barrio created other volunteer opportunities so volunteers could see other available options. Many volunteers found interesting opportunities that kept them coming back to the organization and donating their time and skills.
3. Information package. Although it was expensive, El Barrio has developed informational packages for corporate partners that identify volunteer opportunities at all levels—individual staff time, the in-kind donation of corporate resources, and corporate financial donation.
El Barrio’s corporate volunteer engagement strategy has yielded bigger corporate engagement opportunities. For example, corporations working closely with El Barrio have first source contract with El Barrio for all of their employment needs. El Barrio screens candidates and hosts job fairs, if needed. Some of the staff at corporations teach classes for El Barrio, conduct mock interviews with participants, and offer informal mentorship and guidance to program participants.
Through their volunteer engagement strategy, El Barrio has also been able to engage their corporate partners to offer “in-kind donations” by providing equipment, catering meal events, donating construction material to repair offices, and contributing other nonmonetary support. The success of the corporate volunteer engagement strategy is seen not only in the support that El Barrio receives, but also in the success of the participants. Without the support of these organizations and individuals, El Barrio would not have been able to successfully deliver its customer service and training program, which offers industry-driven training combined with classroom activities, online instruction, hands-on work, standardized curriculum, and a nationally recognized certificate. To date, El Barrio has successfully graduated 359 participants with 232 getting jobs at an average wage level of $10.50.