Over the past year we have identified an increasing level of community interest in family volunteering (adults and children together). This has come from families, employee groups, the media and others.

As one of VV’s roles is to identify emerging trends in volunteerism, we recently surveyed our 296 member agencies to learn more about family volunteering options.

We wanted to determine how many of our agencies currently engage families as volunteers, as well as identify agency capacity for engagement, perceived barriers, current practices / experience around family volunteering and interest in sharing learnings or learning more about family volunteering.

From the 78 agencies that responded to this ...

[Continue reading Results of our Family Volunteering Survey]

Each year Volunteer Victoria works with a wide variety of trainers to deliver workshops for our community participants.  As the Manager of Training and Outreach for Volunteer Victoria, I’m pleased that we are able to offer a good cross-section of learning opportunities for our member agencies and others in our community who need to develop knowledge and skills in nonprofit management.

Just since September last year our staff or contracted facilitators have taught workshops in: fund development, media relations, social media, volunteer management, networking skills, succession planning, communication skills, story-telling, governance, public ...

[Continue reading Our Training Initiatives]

The following is a guest blog post written by Kari Frazer, facilitator of our recent “Planning for Fundraising Success” workshop.  Kari holds the international Certified Fund Raising Executive designation and has been practicing fundraising, marketing and media relations for 24 years.

In my recent Planning for Fundraising Success workshop for Volunteer Victoria I think the pivotal subject was creating the The Case for Support. Many of the 30 people in the room had an ‘aha’ moment when we went to some of their websites and looked for evidence ...

[Continue reading Your Case for Support – a critical first step]

Many organizations are struggling to answer this question as the demographics of the workplace continue to shift. Succession planning is the process of identifying and developing internal employees with the potential to fill key or critical organizational positions. In the ...

[Continue reading Succession Planning – Is Your Organization Ready for the Future?]

Alan Piffer is one of our Volunteer Media Generalist/Writers here at Volunteer Victoria. See his previous blog post on the Luminara Festival. 

For newcomers to Victoria, achieving success in one’s profession or trade can often be a challenging prospect. Imagine, then, what a new immigrant would face trying to adapt to Canadian culture at the same time.

Hugo Kerckhoffs worked as a graphic designer in Mexico before moving to Canada. He has found adjusting his profession to a new country to be somewhat difficult, not just because Canadians do more online work than in Mexico, but also because of the difference in design sensibilities.

“Graphic ...

[Continue reading Mentorship at ICA]

 A little birdie helped us out recently to learn more about nonprofit marketing.

The graphic birdie image pictured above sits in the “1, 2, 3 Marketing Tree”, developed by Mills Communications Group’s founder Erica Mills, who was in Victoria in mid-July to teach a workshop for Volunteer Victoria.  Erica delivered “Nonprofit Marketing: Make the Most of What You’ve Got!” to a collection of our member agencies – and the workshop was a fantastic success.

Nonprofit Marketing: As easy as 1, 2, 3]

It’s only been eight weeks since we launched our Emerging Leaders Network but the group’s membership has already risen to 85 people and we’ve held several fantastic events so far.  This is an update on what has been happening with the Network since it began in late May, and is also a glimpse of the exciting events we’ve got planned for the next few months.

It didn’t take long after we announced the creation of the Network’s online community for younger nonprofit professionals in the Victoria area to start signing up in droves.  In fact, within a week ...

[Continue reading Emerging Leaders Network: The first eight weeks]

NOTE: This post is part of the Embracing the Future-Leading for Change post regarding our Annual General Meeting.

We’d like to thank Mitchell Temkin for delivering the following thought-provoking speech on community leadership at Volunteer Victoria’s Annual General Meeting on June 24, 2010.  Mitchell’s bio can be found at the end of this post.

Good morning.

Val asked me to speak a little about what is coming in the future for community leadership. I was foolish enough to say yes!

I am sure we can all agree that prognostication is a dangerous and iffy thing. It is so easy to be clever and look insightful, but ...

[Continue reading Speeches at Volunteer Victoria’s AGM: Mitchell Temkin]

NOTE: This post is part of the Embracing the Future-Leading for Change post regarding our Annual General Meeting.

We would like to thank Sandra Richardson for the following very informative speech she gave at Volunteer Victoria’s Annual General Meeting on June 24, 2010.  Sandra’s bio can be found at the end of this post.

We are all too familiar with the riveting impact on non-profits from the economic crisis.   We are all asking what next? I feel the sector is now at an inflection point that will reshape it long after the economic crisis.  Non-profits will find themselves in a new reality – not just economically, ...

[Continue reading Speeches at Volunteer Victoria’s AGM: Sandra Richardson]

NOTE: This post is part of the Embracing the Future-Leading for Change post regarding our Annual General Meeting.

Volunteer Victoria held its Annual General Meeting on June 24th, 2010.  The meeting featured a panel of three speakers talking about leadership in the nonprofit sector.  Our first presenter, Beth Cougler Blom, Manager of Training and Outreach at Volunteer Victoria, spoke on the recent creation of our Emerging Leaders Network in Victoria and what local emerging leaders think about sector leadership and the path to get there.  Here is the text of her speech:

About a ...

[Continue reading Speeches at Volunteer Victoria’s AGM: Beth Cougler Blom]