Special Edition 8: Great Philanthropists - Celebrating Volunteerism

Welcome to another edition of “Around with Randall,” your weekly podcast making your nonprofit more effective for your community. And here is your host, the CEO and Founder of Hallett Philanthropy, Randall Hallett.

It’s another great day right here on the podcast, “Around with Randall,” and of course I’m your host, Randall. One of our additional shorter podcasts, celebration of great philanthropists, and some of the things we can learn from them. The first seven of these have been about individuals who have given billions of dollars, in most cases to their communities, to organizations that make a difference, and I do not want to detract from any of them and probably next time we're going to pick a new one. But based on an experience I had this last week it caused me to think that I was narrowing the field way too much. And if we truly believe that philanthropy means love of mankind, love of humankind then we shouldn't necessarily always think about those that give the most amount of money, and in fact when i work, particularly in the area of clinician engagement, grateful patient philanthropy, with clients I talk about this: That philanthropy doesn't mean money. And if we truly believe that, then great philanthropists should also include other things. And today we want to celebrate that, and the idea is volunteerism, people who may not give money but give of themselves, their time, and their talent to make a difference.

I tend to spend more time preparing for the great philanthropist series than I do the other podcasts and this was by far the most amount of prep I have done in a podcast, and it's also the most frustrating. Have been through most - the greatest frustration I’ve been through in trying to set this up and let me tell you why. When you think of great philanthropists in the idea and the spirit of volunteering there's probably a few people's names that come up and they're very important but that's not what I was looking for. So we could have certainly talked about Mother Teresa. If there's not a soul I don't think in the world that's going to argue that she did amazing things for the people of India and I think particularly Calcutta. What do you think about a Florence Nightingale, who certainly worked incredibly hard as a nurse? Starting out working to build the idea of what becomes the Red Cross, but that's not what I was looking for. 

The frustrating part was, is when you start doing some research around volunteerism you find a lot of people who are mentioned as great volunteers, but here's the problem. Ninety-nine percent of these, as I am going through all of these pages of data and research, are dead. They're in obituaries and they're certainly valuable contributions to the describing and indicating the value of that person's life, but why are we waiting until people die to do this? Most often, if you have someone who makes a major gift, a principal gift, a transformational gift, we do all kinds of celebrations. Why aren't we celebrating volunteerism at that kind of level? Now certainly the pandemic has shortened that in terms of the ability to do so because we have less people maybe inside our hospitals or churches or social service agencies. In fact, I just saw an article in the Minneapolis Star Tribune that talked about a food kitchen really struggling because they're really hamstrung by the fact they don't have as many volunteers, so there's a cost perspective to that, but also just because of the pandemic people are a little less willing to enter out into the world, to engage with people, not only because of their own health concerns but also organizations may not be able to let people in the door quite as much because they don't want to get the people or the efforts that they're looking to undertake as a nonprofit, they don't want to get people sick. It's a really tough situation currently. So as I dug around instead of focusing on one person I want to talk about four separate scenarios, only one of which you probably or may have heard of in terms of an organization or connection, because I think what you're gonna find is is that we do this so badly and so poorly. The lesson of this great philanthropist is doggone it, let's celebrate more volunteers, people who may not have a billion dollars but have an infinite amount of love in their heart to want to make a difference for people in their community. 

So let's start with the organization you may have heard of probably so is Yale. Yale has an annual leadership award that's two volunteers who serve in the different ways throughout the university, and yes they're all alums. But here's the interesting thing. So for the 2001 group, the thing that I appreciated about, not only the pictures which grabbed me right away and I'll tell you why here in a moment, but also that these are people inside the school. So it's School of Law, School of Pharmacology, School of Arts and Sciences doing actively engaged in things. The thing that I took away from this group of people, there were six people on this webpage, and with a great description of all sex is number one. They were multicultural that if you see a lot of times volunteers recognized, with all due respect they seem to be white most of the time. This is a group of people that represents a myriad of social and ethnic background, which was really cool to see. But interestingly enough that was the second thing I saw. The other thing that I saw is five of the six were incredibly young. When I think about volunteer awards, most of the time they tend to go to older people and in part because they have time. Maybe they're retired and they have more availability, but we don't celebrate young people. And if we look at the numbers for generational giving or the trends in generational giving, once we can move past the X generation the forgotten generation - that's me - and we move into the Y generation of millennials and others, giving of their time is incredibly important. Organizations should be doing more of that. So how do you celebrate young people? 

The second, and maybe you've heard of this organization if you follow football, is a story and which I was unaware of but I found it and I thought wow that's pretty cool. The New England Patriots’ Bob Kraft, 11 years ago, the owner of the Patriots inside of his foundation and the Kraft family's most of their assets is built into the Patriots, so the Patriots organizations supporting this celebrates volunteerism, they give grants since 2011 - $5,000 apiece to organizations who nominate great volunteers. They actually are putting cash behind the recognition, and I thought wow is that cool. Somebody's doing all of this great work, the benefits of which are to provide service or input to the nonprofit, creating value, creating output, hopefully in terms of what it does, and here's Bob Kraft saying I want to recognize that. What a great idea. They've now moved it to become the Patriots Difference Maker of the Week, they're increasing the amount of opportunity to recognize volunteers. I thought that was really cool.

The other two are interesting in that they take their lead from what I would call tangible gifts, people who make - and we've talked about this in the great philanthropist series - people who make gifts with money, but they took volunteerism and they elevated it to that same level by doing something that most people don't think about. So I’ll start with a story out of England where an organization with a long-time volunteer volunteering nearly to employee level every year, it's a women's crisis center, Aurelia'sEmergency Management. They named as a part of their lighthouse effort one of the women's dorms after a volunteer. Naming opportunities we normally connect to dollars. Now I’m not saying someone volunteers for 20 hours a week and we name something after them because that'll get complicated. But I applaud the fact that Lighthouse and their efforts around this Aurelia's Emergency Service and Management wanted to recognize someone who was giving their full heart and time and talent to the organization in a way that very few people are willing to do. The cool thing about the story was is that they didn't tell her so she comes to work one day the way it looks and reads a newsletter and it's an announcement of the campaign and that they've named this dorm after her and it says in the article as she looked at the reporter through tears in her eyes, “I didn't even know.” How great is that? How much has this woman given to this organization and to women who are in great distress, how much has she given to them to make the world a better place?

The other is out of the United States and it's about Loundes County and their fire department now Loundes County is a small county and it's not one in which you have a lot of people, so as a result their particular effort in terms of firefighting is a volunteer fire force, which in rural areas is more common. We see that here in Nebraska when you get outside the major metropolitan areas because you don't need a fire department full-time but you need a fire department. Well in this case 33 years of not only volunteering to be a firefighter but to lead the organization, to make sure there's training, to make sure there's equipment, to do all of the the rigor that comes with ensuring that they are up to standard code and regulation…33 years an individual led that effort and they called him to work one day and they named the firehouse for him. Think about how many lives this man has saved, directly or indirectly, either through ensuring training that if someone needs an ambulance or a firefighter that it's either him or someone that he was involved with or someone that he trained, someone that he recruited, the equipment that was necessary to take care of that individual or family, that's a monumental investment. If we think about naming a firehouse, we think about naming the women's dorm, we see that so infrequently and that's why this podcast was a little frustrating in terms of prep.

We'll jump back into other philanthropists and try to take something away from each one that we can apply in our own nonprofits in our own communities, in our own work. But I feel badly that it took me this long to make sure I recognized volunteerism as a part of the way in which people give their philanthropy. They are philanthropists. My question for you is, what are you doing to recognize philanthropy? Who are those people that go above and beyond, not just board members, they're showing up almost like employees, they are there decades to make a difference, they want what's best for their community and to help people and this is their way of demonstrating it, and what can you do to recognize them.

The great philanthropist in this edition is volunteerism, and hopefully if I do this again in three, four, five years and pick this back up there's not so many stories in obituaries of people who were wonderful individuals who gave, but more stories about people who were alive and organizations and nonprofits that recognize them for their contribution - a challenge worthy of all of us.

We'll jump back in next time into the regular flow of “Around with Randall.” If you need to get ahold of me, want to talk with me, disagree or just have a thought on the subject podcast@hallettphilanthropy.com. Don't forget to check out the blogs - two or three a week on the various aspects of mostly nonprofit work, but professionalism, certainly the office environment, just the world in which we live, something to think about for 90 seconds. I can't thank you enough for joining me on this edition of the great philanthropists. I hope that you know how important you are and remember, some people make things happen, some people watch things happen, then there are those who wondered what happened and today is about people who are making things happen with their hearts, with their minds, with their hands, with their efforts, and with their time they're making things happen just like we do. I hope you know that you're making a difference for all of those people who are just wondering what happened. I’ll see you next time right here on “Around with Randall,” and don't forget, you make it a great day.