Y Volunteer?

With all the talk around community involvement and volunteering I have been questioning for a while my own motivations for volunteering. It's such an everyday thing for me that when I am thinking about how to motivate people to volunteer more I am prone to asking "Why not volunteer".

A lot of my volunteering is with Girlguiding UK. As I have been a member since I became a Rainbow at age 5 a lot of the usual answers of "I don't have time to volunteer" etc just don't apply because I have always spent one evening a week at Guides so it doesn't seem a hardship. In fact, I think I would be pretty lost without it. Girlguiding afforded me such amazing opportunities as a child that it was important for me to stay involved as I got older to make sure other girls had the same opportunities.

Even so I have chosen to get involved with additional projects outside of my regular commitment to run a Guide unit, for 10-14 year olds, each week. For three years I was on the planning team for The Young Women's World Forum http://www.wagggsworld.org/en/YWWF. This event bought together young women from around the world to discuss and plan action on the UN MDGS. It was great when all our planning came to fruition and we got to meet all these incredible young women from around the globe. This was an brilliant opportunity which taught me a great deal. It has played a big part in my career decisions and I definitely feel that as well as putting a lot in to this project, I got an awful lot out.

Other volunteering I have been involved in has included campaigning for different causes and helping at various events - I enjoy these opportunities as I get to make new friends, learn about difference issues and go to cool events. So there's a lot of reasons why I volunteer -  to champion causes I'm passionate about, to give back, to boost my CV, to do something productive with my time, to meet new people and because it makes me happy! I'd love to know other people's motivations for volunteering and whether different generations' motivations vary so let me know why you volunteer!

Sponsoring hope - sounds pretty good, eh?

A major campaign that has been launched recently is The British Heart Foundation's Mending Broken Hearts campaign. What I like about this campaign is that is lets us in on a secret - that zebrafish can heal their own hearts - and speaks to us in open way. It made me feel that there could be real hope in regenerative medicine and that by supporting the campaign I would really become part of something quite monumental. I must admit at this stage that I am (or rather was) a lapsed regular giver to BHF and they have helped a member of my family in the past. This appeal made me revisit their work and I am now, once again, a regular donor having signed up to the "sponsor hope" aspect of the appeal. 

I do, however, have a couple of thoughts on the campaign. When I signed up I was told that there are several benefits to becoming a sponsor but I think it would be good to allow people to opt out of some of these to allow for a more personalised approach. Whilst I will proudly wear a campaign pin which has been designed by Sir Peter Blake, I have no interest whatsoever in watching a series of DVDs or having a certificate. I would also like all communication to be by email, and whilst I sent a message via the website to say so it would have been nice to be given the choice. I don't know about other age groups but as a Gen Y-er I like to have control over how I engage with things, I like to feel it's on my terms and I would have appreciated a little more choice.

BHF do have a very active twitter and facebook presence which is run well but they don't so far seem to be doing anything outside of their regular commentary and utilising social media in a different way. In fact the methods which have been chosen for the campaign feel quite traditional (TV, charity record etc). The aim of the campaign is to raise £50 million over 10 years so it will be certainly interesting to see how it grows and develops as it's audience grows and shifts. I hope they find ways to get other Gen Y-ers on board and take us with them because we might not be the biggest donors now but in 10 years time we might be the ones you really need... 

I'm excited about 2011!

So, January is over... I always think it's a bit like the "Monday of the year" so I'm not too sad to see it go, although it does seem to have happened rather quickly!

There are plenty of things to cause concern for the sector in 2011, with the economy and the coalition government's attempts to recover it being pretty high on the list. I have been lucky/unlucky (delete as desired) to hear both Nick Hurd and David Cameron speak on the issue of "Big Society" and whilst I obviously support the idea of strengthening communities and building social engagement I have not heard anything that leads me to believe that they know how this will happen and whether they intend to have any part in it doing so! There are a great many people out there doing brilliant things in their community but how are they going to get even more people involved instead of spending tax-payers money on teaching grandmothers to suck eggs? (figuratively speaking of course)

The reason why I am excited about 2011 despite the doom and gloom is there are some great things happening already this year and that shows the resilience and passion of the third sector. Action Aid's "What a Feeling" Campaign for instance is very interesting; the campaign focuses on what supporters get out of being involved in Action Aid's work rather than the services it delivers - the campaign itself has been very well orchestrated with multi-channel advertising and PR stunts. We all try to indicate what our donors and volunteers can get out of being involved with our causes but I think it is pretty brave for Action Aid to focus their whole campaign on this. Being a massive fan of Action Aid's "Bollocks to Poverty" youth channel and a previous volunteer with them I hope that their campaign achieves their organisational aims rather than just being a boost to the sector as a whole.

In fact, it's probably the kind of campaign that should be run to explain to us all what "Big Society" is all about....

Gen Y does WI!

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Who are Generation Y?

Defining someone by their generation undoubtedly uses pretty broad brush strokes as so many other factors can effect how someone behaves (gender and socio-economic background for example). All the same, as I have decided to write this blog with a "Gen Y" slant I thought I should examine the accepted characteristics of this generation and explore my own understanding of the term. 

Definitions of Gen Y vary quite a lot - we may also be called Millennials, Echo Boomers, Net Generation or Boomerang Generation. There is also quite a lot of debate over what birth years are part of Gen Y - I think 1977-1994 is quite a good span and would say that generally I would relate to people in that age range as the same generation as me. Of course some people are on the cusp, particularly when you take the varying definitions in to account. Perhaps Gen Y is still too new a term to have a more accepted definition in the way "Baby Boomer" and "Generation X" do.

What with the name and age range being a little blurry I think that it is more useful to define Generation Y by it's characteristics, which everyone seems more in agreeance on. The two inter-related characteristics of Gen Y which particularly interest me are that of technology dependence and the need for instant gratification.

It goes without saying that we are an extremely technology literate generation and the gadgets and gizmos available to us are interwoven in to our every day lives. However, I think it is key to remember that we have seen a great deal of change in our life times and it may be this which sets us apart from the successive generation. I was born in 1986 and I'm fairly certain that if you described an iPhone to someone then they would have thought you were bonkers. I remember the BBC test card, I can remember what the MS-DOS interface looked like and I remember when the Nokia 3310 was cutting edge and technological advancements are happening at such an exponential rate that I am sure we will see many more unimaginable changes to come.

The multi-channel communications now available to us have been embraced by Gen Y and allow us to create and share in a way which was never before possible. Creative practices in particular have been opened up to the masses - anyone who wants to can make a short film or record a track and then publicise it to the world instantaneously and for relatively low cost. I think this gives Gen Y a strong characteristic of entrepreneurship and the desire for autonomy, which is related to the trait of instant gratification.

I'm always doing a million things at once with lots of different windows open on my PC. I know I'm pretty impatient too; "Bored now!" is one of my most overused phrases and I can be heard shouting it at frequent intervals such as when I have had to queue for more than 2 minutes at the supermarket or wait for a tube for more than 3. I have high expectations for myself and sometimes wonder why I'm not MD of my own international organisation yet. This is definitely symptomatic of my generation but I don't think it is necessarily a negative thing either; I am able to juggle many tasks, look at problems from lots of different angles and I don't accept any less than the best. Gen Y want it all and we want it all now and I think that makes us a force to be reckoned with.

In my next posts I will begin exploring Gen Y and the third sector; until then...