Leading a Volunteer Movement
A few months ago a group of Young Life staff were together to discuss a pillar of the KNOWN campaign: “Leading a Volunteer Movement.” We started the conversation prayerfully considering questions like:
What kind of culture or soil do we need to become so that volunteers could grow?
How do we cultivate organizational and area culture that inspires volunteers toward mission?
What new behaviors do we need to organizationally and perhaps personally consider?
As a group we tended to spend most of the time discussing “technical” solutions to these questions. Tod Bolsinger, author of “How Not to Waste a Crisis, Quit Trying Harder,” recently met with our team and he described technical challenges as challenges that exist that current knowledge skills and tools can resolve. Those technical solutions in our organization are our existing Mission Vision Values and Methods (MVVM) and the YL C’s (Contact Work, Campaigners, Club, Camp, Committee, Church) that are based on Jesus’ model of incarnational witness and missional community.
What was much more difficult for us to discuss were “adaptive” solutions, which Bolsinger described as systemic problems with no clear answer or challenges that cannot be solved with existing knowledge skills and tools.
Often “adaptive” solutions require a shift in behavior. Attempting to ask, “what new behaviors do we need organizationally and personally to consider, in order to become a place volunteers could grow?” is a much more difficult question to answer because it requires something new of us.
The true reality is that the world our volunteers and kids live in is an accelerated world. The needs of kids and volunteers globally is changing at a rapid pace. However, the love of God and the gift of his Son Jesus is relevant and does not change. God may be needing our behavior to change to better represent him in this changing world.
God is definitely up to something when it comes to adaptable change. We can all relate to the changes in kids, communities and church since 2020. One systemic challenge globally is loneliness. You have heard the research: Gallup polls show that one in five adults globally identifies as feeling lonely, with the loneliest age group being 18-24. YL’s RELATE research further adds data and affirms this challenge. What is causing global loneliness to increase, therefore demanding us to adapt? What is an adaptable behavior for the challenge of loneliness?
Jesus’ model has given us the technical solutions to the systemic problem of loneliness; The relational posture of ministry and the building of missional community.
Jesus also offers some adaptive solutions. He experienced humanity; the knowledge, skills and tools of his time in the church. Also, in those 30 years, he grew painfully aware of the systemic challenges of the time. Jesus then began cultivating a new culture that people were inspired by and drawn to.
He started by recruiting 12 volunteers and then He took these volunteers to places and to people that were not typical. He modeled behavior through posture and pace: by stopping to listen and ask questions. He moved at a pace that was approachable, he adapted his pace to accommodate others needs, and he took the time to deeply listen, enjoy an impromptu meal, ask questions, and tell stories. All the while his 12 volunteers were watching and learning how to cultivate health and missional community.
Healthy Culture is one that is aligned in its values and nimble enough to adjust the behaviors that support those values. In our organization's case we have the values but could inspiring a volunteer movement be requiring some new behaviors of us?
What new behaviors do we need to organizationally, and perhaps personally, consider?
What THREE behaviors does your organization, or team need to identify to become a place in which your staff, volunteers, or customers can grow?
What behaviors are you committed to “becoming” that contributes to the cultural soil in which volunteers and relationships can grow?
Written by Lyn Ten Brink