Volunteering...A Family Affair

On Take Your Sons and Daughter to work day, I just happened to be volunteering at 8:00 am, by reading at a local group of pre-school children. My 6 and 8 year old daughter and son came with me, and they really enjoyed participating.

While there may not be a lot of formal volunteer programs designed for families, idealist.org lists some great ideas.

Since our research points to a lack of family volunteer opportunities, where volunteer programs are designed for the entire family, please share any you are aware of. We’re considering designing new a new award program and maybe one should be for the best Family Volunteer opportunities?

CreativeJuices Flowing to Benefit Nonprofits

I was on a call last week with folks at the Corporation for National and Community Service. The latest news is this: they will soon be embarking on a 5 city tour to help develop new policies and procedures for the new programs they’ve been given.

What are those new programs? A new Social Innovation Fund for nonprofit groups that are “developing innovative and effective solutions”. I understand this is about finding new models and taking them to scale; funded at $50-million in 2010. A new Nonprofit Capacity Building Program for small and medium-sized nonprofits to get training and technical assistant in grant-writing and other skills; funded at $5-million for 5 years. Volunteer Generation Fund to increase opportunities for local groups to manage, recruit and support volunteers; $50 million in 2010. Campuses of Service (or Aid for Colleges) would fund up to 25 colleges or universities for community service; funded at $7 million. October 2009 anticipated date of release of the RFPs. We’ll follow this story and keep you in the know.