Marking International Volunteer Managers Day

International Volunteer Managers Day gives everyone in the sector an opportunity to acknowledge and appreciate leaders of volunteers, who spend their lives working to make other people’s lives better.

The day celebrates the contributions of those in the field who, among other things, provide the leadership and direction that allows people to build a good and just society and to mend the social fabric.

This year, the theme for International Volunteer Managers Day is, “What’s our future normal?”.

The COVID-19 pandemic triggered, or accelerated, a lot of changes. Already the role of volunteer manager looks significantly different than it did even five years ago, and the changes haven’t stopped. In each of the past couple of years, I’ve written about trends to watch for the following year. Those trends are now affecting more organizations, and causing greater impact in each.

We are starting to see the truth in the adage, “the only constant is change”. This year’s theme draws attention to that.

My question is, will there be a new normal?

I think the constant changes we see in technology, politics, social mores and so on will spill over into the social impact sector. As the world gets smaller and adapts to changing conditions, the very concept of “normal” is changing.

What was seen as normal in the 1950s, for example, was seen in the 1970s as narrow and backward due to a growing understanding of different cultures. And “normal” in the 1970s was seen as limited in the 1990s and so on. The idea of normal behaviour or practice is now having to be applied to smaller and smaller subsets of humanity. What was thought of as normal behaviour for women, for example, now has to be thought of as normal for married, white, Western Canadian women of a specific economic status. And even then it’s a massive generalization.

So, it may very well be that “best practices” won’t be universal much longer.

Practices that used to be valid across multiple types of organizations and volunteer program styles won’t be as effective as they have been in the past. Granted, people will always be people. The way we interact with them, however, may be different depending on the country we’re in, the type of organization we’re with and a myriad of other factors.

Ideas like “respect for the volunteer” will never go out of style but the way we define and apply the word “respect” may change. In fact, over the last 50 years it has changed dramatically. When I was young, showing respect meant keeping your mouth shut and doing what you were told. Trying to learn a person’s needs was considered being nosy and an invasion of privacy.

The idea of respect will be defined differently depending on the culture where it’s being used. Showing respect to someone in Japan, for example, will involve different behaviours than showing respect to someone in New Zealand.

How will that impact organizations such as Council for Certification in Volunteer Administration?

The CCVA is an international organization. They help set the standards for professional ethics and a competency framework for professionals in the field. But what if that framework needs to change for different environments or if ethics are interpreted differently in different cultures? It will become harder and harder to consistently and objectively credential people.

Unlike engineers, for example, who deal with materials and physics that are consistent in their behaviours, leaders of volunteers need to deal with people, whose behaviour can change dramatically depending on whether they’ve had their morning coffee or not. I have full confidence the CCVA and its counterparts will successfully face this challenge, but it won’t be easy.

So, will there be a future normal?

Frankly, I don’t know. When the International Volunteer Managers Day theme was published, I started to picture what I thought it might be. This column is the result. Here are more questions than answers, I’m afraid.

Will “normal” be applied to so wide a swath of people and organizations that it becomes diluted to the point that it’s meaningless? Or, to such small segments that it’s useless for any practical purpose? Will the word “normal” itself be redefined or will smarter minds than mine (there are a lot of them out there) find a solution that allows us to settle into a state that is reasonably stable and comfortable?

Whatever the answer, I hope you have an amazing International Volunteer Managers Day, and your future “normal” is fantastic. You deserve it.

This article is written by or on behalf of an outsourced columnist and does not necessarily reflect the views of Castanet.