Featured: Our Blog

Did you know that we have a blog??? We do! It’s called Adventures in Volunteering.

What began as an attempt to just share staff (or guest) volunteer experiences with the Kalamazoo world, soon morphed into sharing much more.

Here are the types of things you would find if you visited our blog now:

• Nonprofit Spotlights: Each week (almost), a Volunteer Center staff member posts a short interview with a volunteer coordinator at a local nonprofit organization that uses Volunteer Center services to recruit volunteers. We ask all of them the same questions to get to know the agency and what a typical (or not-so-typical) volunteer experience looks like beyond the volunteer job description posted on our website. Some favorites: Kalamazoo Valley Museum, Borgess Medical Center, the Cheff Center or Events Galore! Actually, all of them are good.  My favorite part is reading “the best thing a volunteer ever did for your organization” segment of each spotlight.  Some of them actually make me well up with tears….but I’m a sap.
• Skills-Based Volunteering Feature: A couple of times a month we post SBV’s on the blog.  These are not  your run-of-the-mill volunteer opportunities.  They may require advanced knowledge or skills.  With more and more Baby Boomers retiring and an increase in corporations that want their employees involved in volunteering, skills-based volunteering is a bit of a trend happening in the nonprofit sector.  Volunteers have specialized skills and talents that they want to use to make a positive impact on the world.  Nonprofits realize that they must leverage those skills and talents if they want to grow and advance as an organization.    We’re still developing our SBV database, though we have all kinds of cool stuff up there so far: musicians, hair stylists, accountants, mechanics, grant writers, needlework, and the list goes on.  Just because it doesn’t exist on our listing yet, doesn’t mean it’s not out there….sometimes organizations don’t even realize or advertise their SBV needs.  Give us a call or an email if you have a specific skill you’d like to share.  Maybe we can help!
• Board Member Opportunities: Nonprofit board members are volunteers too!  And if you consider that there are approximately 800 nonprofit organizations in Kalamazoo County, each governed by a board of directors, that’s anywhere from 5,000-8,000 volunteers needed for these vital roles.  All boards are different and we like to highlight the various board member needs with an emphasis on the mission of the organization, since having a passion for the mission is a must for most board member seats.
• “New This Week” Feature or other Urgent/Featured Volunteer Needs: Right this minute we have more than FIVE HUNDRED volunteer opportunities listed on our website.  We know that’s a lot to wade through and review. Also, we know that it’s not everyone’s idea of fun to check the Volunteer Center website listing on a weekly basis just to see what might be new.  The blog allows us to call out specific opportunities, whether they are new, urgent or just sound cool enough to feature.
• Volunteer Success/Experience stories: We still occasionally feature our own volunteer experiences, to really showcase what an actual volunteer experience looked like for a real person.  Some examples: some thoughts on holiday volunteering, working at the Humphrey Garden, Making a Million meals for Haiti relief at the Salvation Army event, Toy Shop volunteering.
• Anything else we deem worthy! Occasionally we post  some great news from the world of volunteering or a volunteer success story at one of our local organizations or stories about our own events and programs.

Anytime we post something  new on the blog, we also post it via our Facebook and Twitter pages, so follow us there to keep up with volunteering updates.  Or you can grab the RSS feed from the blog too.  Or just visit often: we update several times a week.  Let us know if you have volunteering stories to share or ideas for blog content….we’d love to hear from you!

Did you miss a feature story, and want to find it again? Click here to see all of our past Featured Stories.

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