How bold are you?

Every year on Nov. 5, International Volunteer Managers Day gives us a chance to recognize and celebrate ourselves and other volunteer engagement professionals. It’s our day, when we pay tribute to the creativity, care and courage of all those who lead volunteers.

This year’s theme, “Be BOLD. Make Change” is an invitation to stretch even further, to challenge the status quo, and to take those scary steps that move volunteer engagement forward.

Don’t worry, being bold doesn’t always mean taking big, risky leaps.

Sometimes it just means being seen—speaking up in a meeting when you’d rather stay quiet, experimenting with a new idea that might fail—but it might also transform how volunteers experience their work. The best changes often start small but ripple outward.

A colleague once told me about how he transformed a hospital’s volunteer onboarding process. For years, it had been a PowerPoint lecture in a windowless room. When he suggested it could be interactive, complete with department tours and short meet-and-greets with staff, he met resistance.

“We don’t have time for that,” one manager said.

But he persisted, quietly........

© Castanet