Nonprofit organizations often struggle to recruit and retain volunteers because their operational models fail to account for modern economic realities and volunteer expectations. This session with guest Jessica Pang-Parks dives deep into ethical volunteer engagement, offering practical strategies to integrate volunteers seamlessly into your project planning while honoring their valuable time.

What You'll Learn

In this session, you’ll learn:

• How to shift from transactional volunteer tasks to ethical, modern engagement frameworks that foster true belonging.

• Practical strategies for integrating volunteers into project planning early to avoid last-minute recruitment panics.

• Methods for right-sizing your risk management, volunteer policies, and role-specific screening processes.

Key Timestamps:

• 00:00 - Introduction

• 01:36 - Shifting to Ethical Volunteer Engagement Frameworks

• 10:33 - Managing Operational Risk and Role-Based Screening

• 16:41 - Modernizing Volunteer Policies and Strategic Alignment

Modernizing Volunteer Engagement for Strategic Impact

Unintentional friction in volunteer programs usually stems from treating volunteers as disposable labor rather than vital organizational stakeholders. Nonprofits frequently rely on outdated 1950s operational assumptions, expecting volunteers to have unlimited availability despite modern economic pressures prioritizing paid work. By embedding ethical volunteer engagement into early project planning, leaders can move away from transactional demands and build sustainable relationships. Valuing volunteer time on par with financial contributions creates a culture of mutual respect, ultimately driving stronger mission outcomes and better community trust.

Implementing Ethical Safeguards and Role-Based Planning

Effective volunteer management requires clear structure paired with flexible execution, ensuring volunteers feel supported rather than micromanaged. Leaders must establish role-specific screening processes that balance risk mitigation without creating unnecessary administrative barriers for low-risk tasks. Modernizing your approach also means auditing volunteer policies regularly to address gaps around remote options, staff-volunteer dynamics, and scenario-based training. Integrating volunteers into ongoing staff learning opportunities builds operational alignment, elevates volunteer confidence, and ensures your project execution remains seamless.

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Ready to move your projects and plans forward with more clarity and confidence? Let's Connect to explore the support your organization needs, or learn more about Our Approach to turning strategy into action.

Full Episode Transcript

Prefer to read or search the content? Below is the full transcript from this session. Note: Transcripts are lightly formatted for readability.

All right. Well, hello and welcome to the Impactful Projects and Planning series. I'm Jami Yazdani. I'm excited to be with you here today. In today's session, we're talking with Jessica Pang-Parks about engaging and mobilizing your volunteers. And so, Jessica is a volunteer engagement thought leader dedicated to helping organizations build trust, create impact, and inspire belonging. She's been honored with top industry awards, including the 2023 VMPC Exemplary Leader Impact Award, and she brings rich experience from organizations like Volunteer Toronto, WWF Canada, and Crohn's and Colitis Canada. She's a certified CVA and trauma of money practitioner, and she actively trains leaders through Fleming College. And so, Jessica, tell us about your work and your business. What impact are you hoping to create for your clients?

Yeah, thank you so much for having me. So I am the founder and CEO of Learn with JPP Consulting, and we do volunteer engagement consulting. Now, why are we doing this? Nonprofits work so hard to earn the trust of their supporters, but so many of them overlook the influence that volunteers have on their organization. So that's why nonprofits that give a care they hire me to create impact and inspire belonging through ethical volunteer engagement frameworks, and I really center advocacy and ethics in my work.

Wonderful. So, going off script a little bit, but when you say ethics, what what it what do you mean? A lot of it is about decent work for volunteers. So, not treating volunteers as people who are at your beck and call to show up, you know, unfreeze out of the drawer to do anything and everything the organization wants. Right, not giving them busy work, really making their impact meaningful and connected to their cause, and treating them as well as financial donors are treated because volunteers are giving their only non-renewable resource. You can go out and make more money tomorrow. You can't get your time back. Right, right. Thank you. So thanks for that. So we talk a lot about stakeholders and project management, sort of managing stakeholders. And I find, and I actually often ask when I'm doing training, are there stakeholders you forgot about in a project? And volunteers often are are forgotten, or even though they're expected to do some work in a project, or we're going to lean on them for something. They're often forgotten. People don't think about them. People don't communicate with them. And so, why do you think that happens? And what what do organizations miss when they aren't engaging volunteers in projects?

I think it's what I mentioned earlier about ethics. It's our society and the nonprofit sector at large in general devalues volunteer time and volunteer work. Right? It is consistently underfunded. There was a report from Points of Light saying that I think only nine cents for every $100 in grant funding goes to volunteer engagement. So if you know volunteers give their time freely, but volunteer engagement is not free, right? There's a lot of time and labor that goes into the project management, the relationship development, the trust building between organizations and volunteers, and also between staff and volunteers, and within groups of volunteers, right? So there's a lot of assumptions that you know, volunteers, you know, they're they're happy to be there, they want the experience, whatever it is, and that they're just going to show up magically. And then when that doesn't happen, they're blamed for not wanting to volunteer, but we're in an economic situation right now where people really are choosing paid work because they they need to feed themselves and their family. So it's not that they don't want to volunteer; it's that their capacity doesn't. Allow them to volunteer the way that organizations are used to, because nonprofits are still operating in this mindset that we created in the 1950s, where you know seniors retire and they volunteer. Stay-at-home moms volunteer while their kids are in school, students come and volunteer their free time. Those groups don't have that much time anymore because people are prioritizing paid work and family responsibility. They still want to contribute to their communities and make a meaningful difference. So, how do we modernize how we work with volunteers to give them that? And planning and project management is a huge part of what makes modern volunteer engagement successful.

Yeah, thank you for that. I, you know, it's interesting. As you were talking, I was thinking about you know, and and many of us listening are probably have this experience when you say that you work with nonprofits. People are like, oh, it must all be volunteers. Like everyone's a volunteer, yeah, Right, and I think I wonder if we valued volunteers more if it would help us change the narrative about the value of nonprofits generally. You know, if if volunteers were more valued, then yeah, I don't know. I think it's all. I actually, I actually completely agree with that, right? Because if you look at the genesis of our sector and you go back to Andrew Carnegie, right, and why he became a philanthropist, it wasn't out of the benevolence of his heart. It was because he wanted to continue underpaying workers, continue giving them bad working conditions, so he could amass all this wealth, and then look good by funding things that he cared about, and quote unquote give back to the people, right? By developing their sense of arts and culture or whatever, instead of giving them essentially basic human rights, right? So, so an idea topic, but it's all kind of again.

We're maybe getting a little philosophical, but I I do see there's a comment from from someone saying yes, they value in the position statement, but devalue it on a societal, social, hierarchical level. So you know, I think that's yeah. I think you know maybe if we start treating each other better, it will will raise raise the standards a little bit. It's about seeing the humanity in one another, right? Rather than keeping things very transactional. And what can we get? It's really about you know, I'm a human, you're a human. How can we support one another to get through this really weird and messy world.

So you mentioned the transactional piece. So how can nonprofit leaders create clarity for volunteers without making the experience feel overly structured or transactional?

So the thing is, you do need structure, and you do need things like boundaries, clear expectations, and I would like to say that volunteer engagement is mostly about setting and managing expectations, right? But at the same time, you have to get to know people as individuals, right? And you need to create flexibility within those structures. So, for example, you know, think about how you can give people an experience in supporting the organization, doing what you need them to do, while maybe being able to do it from their home, right in a hybrid situation, or maybe being able to come with their family for family volunteering, so they don't have to figure out childcare, right? So it's not just about setting the expectations. Volunteer engagement is about you know what the volunteer can give, but also how the volunteer is supported. So, what else are you providing within that experience? Be it snacks, be it you know good coaching from staff, be it social opportunities. That's going to keep that relationship within the boundaries of what is going to manage risk for your organization.

So, do you want to spot when you say manage risk? What I'm curious, kind of what you you mean exactly by that?

Yeah, and I find that nonprofits tend to go too far one way or another, in general. So when we talk about managing risk with volunteers, some kind of go too far on the everything is risky. We either can't work with volunteers, or we have to screen them to death. We need to give them, you know, three interviews. We need to reference check, we need to do a police screening, and you really need to think about does the screening fit the role, right? So if that role is working with vulnerable people, children has access to money or data where nobody else is around to supervise, right? Because if there is a staff person managing the cash with them, then maybe you don't need a comprehensive police check, right? But if they are handling 1000s of dollars of cash on their own, then maybe that's a good idea. So that's you know you got to screen based on the role. The other side of it is, oh, everybody's a good person. We can trust everybody, right? And here's the keys to the van: go pick up these vulnerable seniors and drive them to their doctor's appointments.

Right, right, right. So there, there's two sides to it, and again, it's screening to the role, and also trust but verify, right? Okay. Training is a big part of it as well. And what I like to say to people is, when you're training, you can hand someone like a five-page PDF or give them a video, whatever it is, but you actually need to give them scenarios because there's a lot of you know gray area, or there's a lot of preconceptions people come into a volunteer role with,

right, right. Well, because they're bringing their own sort of personal experiences, or their own work, or their own, you know, kind of personal life, or volunteering other places, and so yeah, I do think I think scenarios are also useful for staff. I I see this in sort of you know I'm a former library director, and we would do a lot of emergency, you know, like you know the active shooter drills and all of these things, and telling someone what to do is very different than having them actually run through it. And so, yeah, I can see that obviously being useful with volunteers as well. And now I'm thinking volunteers probably don't even get to go to those trainings, whether they have scenarios or not. But they're standing there, you know, helping people, or you know, in the building, and

and that that's you know how you can enhance the experience for volunteers, right? What are things that you're already offering to staff that you can include volunteers in that aren't going to be a huge stretch or a reach for the organization, but would make the staff more confident about volunteer capabilities, make the volunteers more con confident and competent in their roles, and ultimately serve the mission of the organization better because everybody is better informed.

Right, right, and I do think that information piece. You know, like I said, I feel like in a lot of of projects, when we're talking about communication, people entirely forget about communicating to the volunteers about even about what's like maybe they're not even actively involved, but they need to know. You know, they come in one day and everything looks different, or or whatever, and no one's no one's told. Key staff

changes, key equipment changes, any new board members, any new policies and procedures. Volunteers are too often an afterthought, right? I've been called in to projects so often in like you know towards the it's almost complete. There's 10% left, and it was like okay. And now we need 500 volunteers, and they all need to be trained this way. And we haven't developed the training, and we haven't. About how to recruit them or where to recruit them from, and you have two and a half weeks.

And I will tell you from a project manager's perspective, you probably only got that call because they hired a project manager at the 80% mark. Yeah, yeah. We're like, wait, this isn't going well. We've got to. It's funny because people often call me to help them with a project, and they're like, you know, oh, I'm sure you're used to getting called before the project begins. And I was like, actually, no. People always call me halfway when it goes wrong, and then expect miracles. So I don't know. I'm just validating your your experience there. But it, yeah, 500 volunteers. with two weeks seems yeah.

I think there's also a bit of an assumption, maybe because of our model being based in this 1950s of you know there's retirees and students and stay-at-home parents with time and they're you know maybe waiting by the phone because they're bored whatever right that there's a volunteer pool that can be called and deployed that doesn't exist anymore like I used to see when I started in the sector about 20 years ago I would see volunteer application forms which were like, "What days of the week are you free? That's very not consistent. Like usually, you back in the day, you could like people could say, "Well, I'm free every Wednesday because I know my kid is at this, and you know my parent is at this, and I have the day off. Whatever, that's not that's not true anymore, right? And we we have to recognize that all these time and you know social economic factors that are influencing our own lives as professionals-they are influencing the people who are we're expecting to donate their time as well, right? right. So you've talked about a bunch of different ways. I think that nonprofits unintentionally, right, are creating friction for volunteers. But are there any other? And I know you could could could talk about this for quite a while. But are there any other kind of key things that you see nonprofits doing that are areas where they could really improve? Yeah, one of the things, and I'll drop this in the LinkedIn, is I see a lot of nonprofits have non-existent or very outdated Volunteer policies, and whether those policies mirror or the same as staff policies. So, if there's a policy, perhaps about like drug use, alcohol use, violence and harassment, whatever it is, right? A lot of those policies can be shared between staff and volunteers, but at the same time, there are things like you know how often can someone volunteer? What is the policy for a former staff member who might want to volunteer? It depends how they left, right? Or maybe it maybe you need to give them some time. What's the policy for people whose friends and family want to volunteer? What if that volunteer is in a role, maybe it's a board role that influences that person's job? What is the policy right for staff who want to volunteer? And I also see at some nonprofits that maybe staff are encouraged to volunteer, but it's also a subtle, you know, unethical nudge towards do your work for free.

Right, right. Wow. So yeah, I have

a resource on that. It's a volunteer policy audit, and I will drop that into the LinkedIn later on today.

Yeah, thank you. That's great. So we're we're almost at time here. What is the best way for folks to to reach out to you?

Yeah. So everyone can find me online, learnwithjp.com. That's also my Instagram handle and my YouTube handle. I make a lot of short videos that can be found on there. You can also find me on LinkedIn. Obviously, if you're watching on LinkedIn, connect with me there. I'm happy to answer questions that come through, and really appreciate the opportunity to chat with you today.

Yeah, thank you. Thanks for the time, and I will put in a plug. Jessica just came to another group that I'm involved with and did a training on on volunteer engagement. It was really wonderful. She's a great presenter. Lots of good content. We got a lot of great feedback. Back about it, so just gonna throw that out there. So thanks for the for the time for the conversation. I'm sure we could could talk definitely could talk longer about volunteers, but I hope this was useful to folks. So thanks everybody. Thank you for attending our Impactful Projects and Planning series. You can find recordings and all of the previous sessions in the series at yazdaniconsulting.com/ipp. Thanks, everybody. Bye.