revision with transitions

One of the problems I found doing this summer of service project is the problem of retention. I haven’t seen it personally this summer, but it has been talked about in meetings. Our goal was to not be a fly by night church that shows up with gifts and promises of being around to minister and to help those we meet, and then maybe only show back up once or never, for instance this is another way people view churches when trying to take on community service projects however one that we strive to break the mold on.

                While not seeing our numbers go down substantially this summer, I have seen some weeks we have more help and others we do not have the help we need. The retention rates of volunteers doing community service are a problem all organizations find themselves having when undertaking a community service project. Sometimes the retention rate is so low that the organization has to abandon the project all together or scale it back to a more manageable goal. I have recently, through researching community service projects at my church seen how the retention rate affects even small projects for instance if someone who you are counting on doesn’t show up, it might throw off the whole plan and have to rework it at the last minute, or cancel it all together, luckily we have not had that problem. Community service is something a lot of people talk about doing, or wanting to do, but not many are willing to put in the time to do it however most people don’t realize how little time is needed usually if everyone works together to do even a large project.

                The leadership of these organizations I believe is where to start with the issue of retention of volunteers. Our community does a lot of volunteer work and most of it is successful. Those organizations must have different ideas on how to keep their numbers up to complete the service projects and my proposal is to research these organizations and try to figure out how they retrain there volunteers.

                Is it the particular project that draws the volunteers to stay and see it through? Is it the caring of the local community that brings out volunteers in numbers to help others in need? Is it the love of the organization itself that inspires people to volunteer and the product of that is the helping of others or the community?

                The WHAS Crusade for Children is an amazing success story. Through the work of mostly volunteers they collect millions of dollars to help the local children in our community that are in need of medical treatment and other needs. It is through volunteers that stand at intersections for hours at a time, and go door to door collecting money that this is possible. I believe it is the love of children and the love of the organization that has grown over the years that allows this to be as successful as it has been over the years.

                The idea is to increase retention rates of the volunteers and hopefully increase the numbers of volunteers that will aid in helping our community. I have not proposed one idea to make that happen but hopefully through research I can find different ideas that will allow the leadership of these organizations and the projects themselves to be more successful when undertaking community service projects. I want to research and find out how other local volunteer organizations are dealing with retention rates, especially in this current economy. I wish to find out how they deal with them currently, and how they have addressed them in the past. I wish to find out what current plans are in use, what is working and what is not working, and propose a solution, hopefully, or a combination of ideas that will help all organizations deal with the problem of not only finding volunteers but keeping them once they have them.

                I will focus mostly on other churches in the area, but will branch out to other local organizations and find out how they are tackling the problem, in fact any people don’t realize how important volunteers are to our community and what they actually do. To do the research on this I will be contacting organizations and volunteers groups and there leaders. I will try to find statistics to back up any facts I find, and will use the internet to try to find more sources I might not be aware of.

                My ideas about what the church had done in the past during my research for unit 2 has been greatly expanded through the information i have gathered during the oral history and through reading more history about the church. Researching more about how to make the missions and community service more successful through learning what other organizations have done will help the community as a whole and my church as an organization accomplish the goals they set.