The Virtues of ‘Virtual Volunteer’ Efforts

In today’s culture, besotted as it is with celebrity worship and news as entertainment, it’s often easy to forget what really makes history: ordinary people volunteering to do the day-to-day work necessary to solve problems and set the social agenda.

Every significant social movement in the history of the United States--the abolition of slavery, the civil rights movement, feminism, the struggle over abortion--has been started and conducted by volunteers, not by politicians or professionals. We can expect that future movements started by volunteers will use the tools of our age, the Internet and computers.

Today is the opening of a “national summit” in Philadelphia on volunteerism, co-chaired by President Clinton and former President Bush. In addition to the current and former presidents, the gathering will showcase celebrities such as Oprah Winfrey and Tony Bennett in addition to the work of thousands of volunteers from all over the nation.

The conference will launch a new organization, America’s Promise, that will attempt to initiate a renewed spirit of civic involvement in the U.S. Dr. Stuart Shapiro, the head of the conference’s organizing committee, calls this “the most important domestic activity of the decade.”

The Presidents’ Summit for America’s Future has a Web page (https://www.americaspromise.org/) that includes sophisticated methods for people to participate in the conference remotely, and also for matching volunteers to community needs. This is a new example of a phenomenon going on throughout the country now: the use of the Internet to promote and support volunteer activity.

Impact Online is an organization that was started to help link the volunteer sector with the capabilities of the Internet. Jayne Cravens, who lives in Austin, is manager of Impact Online’s Virtual Volunteering program. (Impact Online is at https://www.impactonline.org/)

“We talked to a lot of people--hundreds of people--who told us they wanted to help nonprofits by using online technologies, such as doing a Web page or helping research grants,” Cravens says. “But we found that we didn’t know how to use these people well, and the nonprofits didn’t know what could be done online either.”

Impact Online began a “matching” program, using the Web to match volunteers with the needs of nonprofits. The organization also consults with nonprofits to figure out how they can use people with high-tech skills.

A similar effort has been going on for over a decade through CompuMentor (https://www.compumentor.org), which was started in the San Francisco Bay Area. CompuMentor matches computer professionals with nonprofits, either to help nonprofit managers learn how to use computers or to develop database programs, Internet resources or other computer applications.

The city of Los Angeles runs a Volunteer Bureau on the Web (https://www.ci.la.ca.us/department/VOLBUR/). A database of open volunteer positions in city departments can be viewed by interested Internet users. The positions range from animal care at animal shelters to research analysis in the mayor’s office to grant research for the Police Department.

A goal of Impact Online is to develop online tools that will enable volunteers throughout the country to find opportunities within a five-mile radius of home. Cravens says that in some cities, this is best done through e-mail listservs or UseNet newsgroups instead of Web pages. But even commercial Web sites are getting into the act: CitySearch, which operates local online information services in a number of cities in the U.S., contains an online volunteer-matching service.

One of the biggest volunteer efforts is NetDay (https://www.netday96.com/), a national campaign to mobilize volunteers with networking skills to help wire the nation’s public schools. NetDay, which started in California, has been based on the work of more than 27,000 volunteers in nearly every state. The NetDay Web site allows new volunteers to search for matches by city or state, and it provides the networking status of schools and maps of where the schools are situated. People can volunteer online with a registration form, and sign up for specific schools.

There are, of course, problems encountered when nonprofits use the Internet for “virtual volunteering.” Cravens says that one of the most common goals of volunteers she deals with has been working with children, but many nonprofits that serve kids are wary of linking children and adults online. Cravens helps nonprofit staffs screen volunteers, and she recommends several techniques, such as monitoring communications, using aliases instead of real names, and conducting e-mail inside of secure intranets rather than on the open Internet.

“Virtual volunteering,” she adds, “should not be regarded as a substitute for people volunteering in the ‘real world.’ ” Nonprofits need a variety of different kinds of help, most of which can’t be done online. But “virtual volunteering,” Cravens observes, can expand the number of people who can participate--extending opportunities to disabled people, for example, or to people who just can’t go to meetings or to a nonprofit site.

Many critics of the emerging trends in cyberspace worry that the technology will promote “cocooning,” or a retreat into the private sphere or the virtual world. The growing intersection relationship between the Internet and the volunteer sector--that backbone of democracy--is giving us a reason to be more optimistic.

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Gary Chapman is director of The 21st Century Project at the University of Texas at Austin. He can be reached at gary.chapman@mail.utexas.edu