Volunteering offers people from all walks of life a way to help kids read. Plus, people who volunteer contribute more money - three times that of non-volunteers. Harnessing the power of volunteers can help accelerate your early grade reading strategies and raise corporate engagement, public visibility, community enthusiasm and more.
More and more United Ways are using strategic volunteer engagement as a way to drive their education impact work and a way to engage donors more deeply to the issue. Plus, people really want to help. In United Way’s survey, almost 7 of 10 people say they are willing to volunteer for education and they’re looking for organizations that can help create clear pathways for them to act that are tied to large-scale change. (Read more in our Education Town Hall report.)
That’s why United Way has launched a call to action, to recruit one million people as volunteer readers, tutors and mentors. Learn more about the education volunteer call to action.. Find tips, tools and templates for strategic volunteer engagement (including a guide for engaging reading volunteers and tools and tips for reading with children).
Engage volunteers to do things that matter over the long run. It’s good to launch a book drive to get more books for high-risk elementary schools for example, but even better to give people the chance to sign up as reading tutors when they drop their books off.
For example, if one of your early grade reading strategies is to provide support to students struggling with reading in kindergarten through third grades, one high-impact approach might be to recruit more volunteers to read with targeted kids in all 2nd grade classrooms in all high-risk elementary schools. Because volunteering isn’t free, it takes resources to recruit, train, deploy and oversee volunteers, United Way could work with relevant organizations in town to create a more coordinated volunteer recruitment effort. With the agencies working together in more strategic ways, it may be that a business partner would agree to step in to handle the fingerprinting and background checks or the local TV station might agree to produce and air public service ads calling for volunteers. The local Target or Wal-Mart could agree to host a volunteer fair or the community college could host a volunteer training on the weekend.
