Tapping Family Potential

More kids and parents seek volunteering opportunities

Margaret Brewer knew her colleagues had doubts when she started a formal effort to encourage families to volunteer together at the Aquarium of the Pacific, in Long Beach, Calif. The first family to sign up about two years ago, a mother and her 6-year-old son, were given the task of guiding visitors through exhibits.

Staff members at the aquarium feared that such a young volunteer wouldn’t be able fulfill his duties as a volunteer guide, she explains.

“There were staff members saying to me, ‘Margaret, what are you thinking?’” recalls Ms. Brewer, the aquarium’s manager of volunteer services.

But soon after the mother-son team started volunteering, the boy quelled staff members’ concerns, impressing them with his lively interest in the charity’s work. Amid reports of cases of the West Nile virus, the boy asked the aquarium’s senior aviculturist how the group planned to protect its lorikeets, one of the tropical bird species at risk for contracting the virus.

“No one questioned his role here anymore,” Ms. Brewer says.

The aquarium is not alone in discovering that families can be highly motivated volunteers, but most charities do not actively recruit families. In one study of Fairfax, Va., more than 80 percent of nonprofit groups in the Washington suburb did not have any families among their volunteer ranks, although nearly three-quarters of the groups said they would be interested in working with such volunteers.

Making a Commitment

Interest among families is also high, especially as more and more high schools and middle schools require students to perform community service.

Still, not every charity can make family volunteering work.

Nonprofit officials must first assess if their organizations can provide activities that are safe and appropriate for kids, and ensure that the tasks won’t expose their organizations to legal and other risks, managers of volunteers say. And charities should make sure that enlisting families as volunteers will help the organization while at the same time providing worthwhile experiences for volunteers.

“It’s hard enough for parents and kids to be together at a mealtime, much less spending a morning or an afternoon at the aquarium,” says Ms. Brewer. “Families are more likely to be unable to meet the commitment.”

But, she adds, “that’s a chance I’m willing to take. However long they’re with us, we have recruited more people in support of our mission, and that’s a good thing. And maybe they’ll be back.”

Changing Perceptions

While busy schedules can be a problem, the biggest hurdle in getting more families to volunteer is convincing charity officials that children can be an asset rather than a burden, family-volunteering proponents say.

Whitney Soenksen, youth and family programs coordinator at Boston Cares, a volunteer-recruitment center, says she constantly encounters preconceived notions about misbehaving children from charities she asks to host the daylong projects she organizes for families every other month. It is difficult to convince charities that 11-year-olds can paint a gym or weed a garden, she says, “but I can honestly say I have never had an agency say, ‘Don’t bring them back.’”

Deborah Spaide, founder of FamilyCares, a Web site about family volunteering (http://www.familycares.org), says that negative attitudes about young children’s volunteer potential may be changing.

“The climate for child philanthropy has improved greatly,” she says. When she started the site in 1997, Ms. Spaide says, “we couldn’t convince people that kids could actually be serious about a task. I think the population is changing their minds. Kids are a real force for change.”

Indeed, many charity officials who recruit families say they started doing so not because they needed more volunteers but because young people were calling them, looking for places where they could volunteer.

Patsy Porter, volunteer coordinator at the Orange County Animal Services Division, in Florida, expanded her organization’s volunteer program about two and a half years ago. Initially, she planned to require volunteers to be 18 or older, as do other animal shelters in her region. But as soon as word got out about volunteer opportunities, she was deluged with calls from children and parents who wanted to work at the shelter together.

“I had more families calling than individual volunteers,” Ms. Porter says, adding that interest from families has continued to grow. “There are more young people wanting to volunteer than when I started the program.”

Ms. Porter says she started out small, choosing two parent-child teams who were asked to volunteer for six months to test whether the idea would work. The youngsters displayed a great deal of enthusiasm, she says, and the families met or exceeded the six-month requirement with ease.

The program now boasts about 20 families who exercise the shelter’s dogs, play with cats, and sometimes help with events such as the shelter’s annual adopt- a-thon, a special event that encourages people to take animals home. Ms. Porter says that she prefers child volunteers to be at least 10 years old, but she will sometimes accept children as young as 8, depending on the youngster’s height, weight, and maturity, which can be important factors in working with dogs and other animals.

“Shelters have turned away youth and families,” says Ms. Porter. “But I found this was a good way for the families to connect.”

Avoiding Baby-Sitting

Many charity officials say they believe that volunteering helps strengthen family bonds. But whether such programs strengthen the charity is determined by how they are set up and managed, charity officials say.

In creating good volunteer programs for children and families, some organizations have a much easier time than others, notes Chris Gingrich, the volunteer liaison at Kline Creek Farm, a living-history museum in Winfield, Ill.

“In our case,” he says, “including children was an obvious match because our mission is to portray family farm life in the 1890s.” But for other organizations that lack activities appropriate for children, he says, “a family-volunteering program has a high risk of becoming a baby-sitting program.”

To avoid that problem, Jefferson County Open Space, a wilderness-preservation program in Golden, Colo., allows families to volunteer for specific types of activities. Nora Simmons, the group’s volunteer coordinator, encourages families with children to clear trails and pick up litter, but more risky jobs such as monitoring controlled fires to clear undergrowth are left to adults.

“We make the effort to include families when we can,” says Ms. Simmons. “But to bring children into some of our jobs would be a hindrance to the adult volunteer.”

Annette Bellino, a mother of three who volunteers with her two oldest daughters at Kline Creek Farm, agrees that managers need to be aware of children’s limitations.

“Children, depending on their ages, don’t have the physical strength or attention span an adult would,” she says. She suggests that coordinators shorten shifts for youngsters. And while children are volunteering, she says, they should be active at all times. The volunteer manager at Kline Creek Farm plans several activities for Ms. Bellino’s girls before they show up for their shift.

While certain concessions have to be made for families, coordinators of volunteers say, children should not be treated differently from adult volunteers.

At the Aquarium of the Pacific, Ms. Brewer interviews the parents and children together, has all of them sign a document agreeing to serve for at least six months and other conditions, and gives a name badge to each family member.

“The paid staff needs to make it clear that we view them all as full members of the program,” says Ms. Brewer. “It adds to their pride. It makes the kids feel 10 feet tall.”

She also recommends holding a joint interview with the family members, which helps uncover their motivations for volunteering and may indicate whether to expect any behavior or cooperation problems.

“Both the parent and the child have to buy into it,” Ms. Brewer says. “It’s not really going to work if one is dragging the other in.” In those cases, Ms. Brewer says, only the interested party ends up doing the work.

Scheduling can also be an issue because most families are available only on evenings and weekends, says Ms. Soenksen of Boston Cares. She advises organizations interested in recruiting families to start with a one-time volunteer activity during a holiday when families are free from school and work.

Preparation Needed

But before families start volunteering, charities need to make sure they are adequately trained for their jobs — in ways both children and parents can understand, managers of volunteers say.

Dorot, a Jewish social-services organization in New York that serves the elderly, has relied on families to volunteer since the charity opened its doors 30 years ago.

One program arranges for families to visit older people in their homes. To prepare everyone for the volunteer relationship, Dorot provides both the families and the charity’s clients with guides on what to expect. The charity also gives out a colorful booklet for children ages 5 to 10 that introduces them to volunteering in the visitation program.

“There’s a tremendous amount of attention to detail here,” says Vivian Fenster Ehrlich, Dorot’s executive director. “You need to make sure that the people investing their time are doing something worthwhile.”

But preparing volunteers and the people they help is only part of the necessary groundwork. Making sure that staff members understand volunteers’ capabilities helps ensure that family-volunteering projects run smoothly, says Ms. Simmons of the Open Space group. “The paid staff needs to be aware of the ability levels of children,” she says. “You need to be cognitive of what a 7-year-old can do.”

If an organization cannot host projects that allow children to volunteer at their headquarters, they can engage families in other ways, says Tara Whalen, coordinator for community projects at AmeriCares, a Stamford, Conn., relief group.

Because her charity’s warehouse of donated pharmaceuticals is not child-friendly, Ms. Whalen says, she encourages parents and children to help the organization raise money or obtain products for the children it helps overseas.

As a result, families have organized activities such as lemonade stands to raise money and drives to collect stuffed animals.

Whether or not an organization can offer family-volunteering activities on its premises, drawing children into a charity’s work pays off in the long run, says Ms. Fenster Ehrlich of Dorot. Many of the group’s young volunteers who were recruited with their families, she notes, have stayed with the social-service organization for 10 years or more.

“The children grow and suddenly they’re independent volunteers as teens and join our youth board and start doing things for Dorot with friends,” she says. “It’s incredible to see them graduate and take this on as their own initiative.”