Getting help where it’s needed most

WELL-TRAVELED: Collette Vacations is among the local companies that has made service a priority. Pictured above are Collette volunteers from left: Lauren Pinto, corporate trainer; Josh Picther, outside-sales trainer; Cochetta Horton, call-center trainer and Anna Tajaea, director of training. / PBN PHOTO/RUPERT WHITELEY
WELL-TRAVELED: Collette Vacations is among the local companies that has made service a priority. Pictured above are Collette volunteers from left: Lauren Pinto, corporate trainer; Josh Picther, outside-sales trainer; Cochetta Horton, call-center trainer and Anna Tajaea, director of training. / PBN PHOTO/RUPERT WHITELEY

The idea that less can be more usually doesn’t apply to volunteerism, especially with cash-strapped nonprofits clamoring to augment a downsized workforce and recapture a volunteer base lost during the recession.
However, that recession also has created a corporate culture of giving back, in which more companies are turning to hands-on volunteering over financial donations to sustain their philanthropic commitments.
Where all these socioeconomic circumstances intersect is a sort of mismatch between the ways in which Rhode Island companies want to give to the nonprofit sector and the ways in which the state’s nonprofit organizations most need help.
Crossroads Rhode Island, which provides, among other things, housing, case management and vocation services to the state’s homeless and at-risk populations, has experienced this predicament.
“Sometimes coming up with a volunteer project for 40 people could be difficult,” said Karen Santilli, Crossroads vice president of marketing and development. “Some might say you’re sending volunteers away.”
Santilli was referring to her organization’s policy of redirecting large corporate groups Crossroads cannot accommodate to Serve Rhode Island, a nonprofit that works to increase volunteerism in the state and maintains an online database of volunteer opportunities for businesses, groups and individuals.
The hope is that Serve RI, which also functions as the state’s volunteer center, will be able to help any business in search of a place to send its group of volunteers.
But that’s not always the case.
In its new strategic plan, released late last year, Serve Rhode Island identified, through a survey of Rhode Island nonprofits, a need to make volunteering easier and more accessible to groups who, as a general rule, prefer project-centered service such as food sorting, tree planting or classroom painting over long-term commitments. “I have a sense that more and more businesses want to contribute in this way,” said Bernie Beaudreau, Serve R.I.’s executive director. “They don’t have lots of charitable money but they do have human resources to lend. But most [nonprofits] don’t want [groups] to [just] come in on a particular morning.”
There are some organizations, including Crossroads, who have long welcomed corporate groups for one-time projects.
Through partnerships with, for example, Blue Cross & Blue Shield of Rhode Island’s Blue Angels program, the nonprofit annually hosts large groups of co-workers but dates for those are worked out at the beginning of each calendar year. Crossroads staff also meets with such companies, including Citizens Bank, to talk about how employees that year would like to volunteer.
“Then there are the groups that out of the blue will say, we’re having a team-building day and ‘We want to incorporate community service, do you have something for us,’ ” Santilli said. “Those are the ones that tend to be a little more challenging.”
The Rhode Island Community Food Bank navigates group volunteer requests with a simple scheduling formula. Kelly Seigh, volunteer and special-events manager, makes her volunteer schedule available two months in advance and reserves some of that time for groups.
Those slots can accommodate anywhere from five to 25 volunteers. Those volunteers are trained and given a three-hour shift to sort, inspect and package food.
“Occasionally, people will want to bring 60 people all at once and it’s kind of hard for us,” Seigh said. “A lot of time they have the idea to do it as a team-building thing, but in a lot of ways it’s about what we have and need at that very moment.” Team building and morale boosting are two common reasons given by businesses that encourage employees to give, even offering them paid hours with which to volunteer.
Collette Vacations in Pawtucket is one local company that has been praised for such a policy.
“Employees [also] often don’t know each other from different departments. It’s [to] meet other employees and work together,” said Lynne Kelly, Collette Vacations community-relations manager. “They get time to work together, have fun and get a sense of giving back to their community.”
Collette employees, she said, engage in a variety of group volunteer sizes, including for short-term service projects to more successive commitments, such as mentoring children at the Boys and Girls Club in Pawtucket.
Most employees, she said, do find it easier to step away and give their volunteer time in limited doses.
A group of four recently took a food-bank slot, representing the kind of compromise Beaudreau said nonprofits and businesses need to reach more often to fulfill each other’s needs.
In early March Beaudreau sent out a group-volunteer, service-projects survey as part of Serve RI’s Getting Things Done 2013 initiative to create proactive, rather than reactive, approaches to planning projects for group work.
“If you look at it from a supply-and-demand equation, [it] has been a little heavily sided on the supply side,” Beaudreau said. “Our strategy is to really organize the nonprofit sector to have much more demand. All that’s really requiring is for organizations to think ahead a little.”
The food bank is a good example. Decreased inventory has actually reduced the need for volunteers. The two-month scheduling period and working to bring in smaller groups work well. •

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