Student Research Project: Volunteer Program Case Study
Amy Krigsman
University of Central Florida
April 25, 2021
History and Context of Volunteerism at Healthier Jupiter
To understand the history and context of Healthier Jupiter and its organizational and volunteer structure, one must first understand its primary benefactor, Palm Health Foundation. Palm Health Foundation was established in 2001 with a mission to “inspire and fund solutions for better health in Palm Beach County through community collaboration” (Palm Health Foundation, n.d.). In 2014, Palm Health Foundation launched the Healthier Together initiative in six Palm Beach County communities, centering community-driven and equitable solutions as the core framework to uniquely address social determinants of health and to combat health disparities in each community through policy and systems change (Palm Health Foundation, 2020).
Figure 1. Healthier Together Organizing Structure
Each community is headed by a Project Director – in Healthier Jupiter’s case, that person is Joanna Peluso – and receives $200,000 per year in financial support from Palm Health Foundation via a fiscal agent (Palm Health Foundation, 2020) – for Healthier Jupiter, that agent is Jupiter Medical Center. The organizational structure (see Figure 1) is rounded out and guided by a steering committee and workgroups, with community always at the center driving change.
Healthier Jupiter’s Steering Committee, which acts as its governing body, is made up of nonprofit and public organizational leaders from across the community, including representatives from the American Heart Association; El Sol; its fiscal agent, Jupiter Medical Center; its funder, Palm Health Foundation; the School District of Palm Beach County; and MyClinic among others. The Steering Committee is responsible for fiscal, mission and vision, and strategic oversight of Healthier Jupiter.
Workgroups form the bulk of Healthier Jupiter’s volunteer base and engage in objective- or project-specific discussions and actions. This will be discussed in more depth in the next section. Moving along the Healthier Together Organizing Structure, the next level of engagement is that of community members.
Structure and Status of Healthier Jupiter’s Volunteer Program
Because Healthier Jupiter is not a traditional nonprofit – as of the writing of this report, it does not hold its own 501(c)3 status – and does not provide direct service to the community and, therefore, does not offer traditional action-oriented volunteer opportunities (see Figures 2 & 3) where volunteers would participate in events, etc., Healthier Jupiter presents an interesting case study and begs the question: what is a volunteer? How is volunteerism defined? The answers to these questions have been relentlessly debated among the academic community, from being broadly defined as “helping activities” (Lee & Brudney, 2012, pp. 159) to a form of leisure (Stebbins, 1996), but, as Haski-Leventhal et al. (2018) so eloquently put it, “It depends on whom you ask” (pp. 31S).
Healthier Jupiter’s mission, and the work surrounding it, is largely conceptual. The workgroups represent community issues – task forces of sorts – that address needs identified through ongoing conversations with the community on the part of Healthier Jupiter and its partners (primarily Steering Committee member organizations) asking questions like: What does the Community need more of? How does Healthier Jupiter add value to the direct service work its community partners are already doing?
Much of the conversation that goes on is surrounding frameworks for action, rather than physical steps to take towards completing a project and falls into the category of Policy, Systems, and Environmental Change (PSE) which focuses on “strategies [that] go beyond education and information programming to embed changes in a community, and they are designed to be more sustainable and reach a larger number of people than programming alone,” (Lott & Story, 2019, pp 9). This systems level thinking may present its own set of problems. Community members familiar with traditional volunteer roles may find this type of work confusing and feel as though they are not truly accomplishing anything by what they perceive as merely having a conversation, resulting in role ambiguity (Harp et al., 2017).
Additionally, this type of conceptual work often takes more thought and preparation and time than traditional action-oriented volunteer work, which may exclude target community members who often would not have the time to devote to this type of work, especially when one considers that the target audience for involvement is the same group of people who are often overlooked by the system and who may be struggling just to make ends meet. These circumstances often do not leave excess time to devote to systems change. In these instances, microvolunteering (Heley et al., 2019) and virtual (Lee, 2019) volunteer opportunities may present the most practical means of accessibility for this population. Likewise, informal volunteer opportunities may also lead to increased participation, even if sporadically or intermittently (Lee & Brudney, 2012). However, more information is needed from these target populations in order to (1) better determine why they do not currently participate in Healthier Jupiter volunteer opportunities, and (2) to identify ways to engage them to participate.
Overview of Current Volunteer Management Practices
The Role of the Volunteer Administrator
As Project Director, Joanna is employed through Jupiter Medical Center, the initiative’s fiscal agent, and is the sole employee of Healthier Jupiter. As such, she oversees every aspect of the initiative’s operations including volunteer recruitment and management, which includes conducting committee meetings and communicating with committee members. The Community Action Committee and Walk & Bike on Jupiter Committee each meet monthly – currently via Zoom. The Steering Committee meets bi-monthly. There is also regular communication with committee members via email.
Recruitment, Screening, Training, Job Assignment, Retention, and Recognition
Recruitment and screening of volunteers is almost exclusively done via word of mouth and personal referrals. Healthier Jupiter engages in some outreach events and is a member of the Palm Beach County North Chamber of Commerce; however, this course of action has been severely limited by in-person gathering restrictions due to the COVID-19 pandemic and Healthier Jupiter has not pivoted to utilize online outreach tools such as popular volunteer recruitment website VolunteerMatch.org. There is also a missed opportunity in better utilizing Healthier Jupiter’s website to capture potential volunteers. Referring back to Figures 2 and 3 and the previous section, where it is noted that Healthier Jupiter’s mission is largely conceptual, this presents an obstacle in recruiting community members as new volunteers. However, Healthier Jupiter could better position its website and use it as a tool to enhance understanding of and highlight its systems-level work to drive volunteer interest and engagement. Joanna has also noted that she is advocating for a link to Healthier Jupiter’s website on its fiscal agent, Jupiter Medical Center’s website.
Another way that Healthier Jupiter engages with potential volunteers is through its mini-grant process. Applicant organizations sometimes have one or more employees serve on a Healthier Jupiter workgroup; however, this is far less frequent an occurrence than it could be and the lack of applicant organization participation is an area of opportunity in Healthier Jupiter’s recruitment techniques. The future of the mini-grant process is uncertain and is under consideration for revision or termination. Rather than terminate the mini-grant process entirely, it is the recommendation of this report to revise the process so that it more accurately reflects the work Healthier Jupiter is doing and more specifically targets the types of projects Healthier Jupiter would like to see take place in the community. This will allow for Healthier Jupiter to continue to build community relationships and networks while fulfilling its mission and without losing the opportunity to engage organizational leaders as potential volunteers.
Diagnosis of the Problems and Suggestions for Improvement
Many of the problems with Healthier Jupiter’s volunteer program have been identified throughout this report. Below is a concise list of those issues, in addition to others that have been identified but not specifically addressed above, along with corresponding suggestions for improvement.
It is important to note that this is by no means a comprehensive list of areas of improvement for Healthier Jupiter’s volunteer program. Given the time constraints of this project, the above represents the five (5) most prominent gaps in Healthier Jupiter’s volunteer engagement strategies and practices.
Limitations and Reflection
It is difficult to assess an organization like Healthier Jupiter’s volunteer program for several reasons. First, Healthier Jupiter is not a traditional – or even IRS recognized – nonprofit. It is a community-led initiative fiscally operated by Jupiter Medical Center and funded by Palm Health Foundation. As such, there are a lot of actors at play. Additionally, there is a complex history to the organization that is nearly impossible to assess as an outsider in a matter of a few weeks or months. Therefore, it is recommended that Healthier Jupiter use this report as a jumping off point from which to conduct its own, more thorough internal volunteer audit, perhaps as a project for the Steering Committee.
A helpful step to take in this process would likely have been a survey of current volunteers to learn how and why they came to Healthier Jupiter, why they continue working with the organization, how they view their role(s) and responsibilities, etc. This data would have assisted in informing current and potential future recruitment and retention practices and would have helped to devise strategies for moving forward. However, this idea did not come about until nearer to the submission deadline which did not allow for enough time to conduct an effective survey and analyze any subsequent data. A further and more in-depth study of Healthier Jupiter’s volunteer program should include such a survey and analysis, as recommended above. Instead, this report contains a sample current volunteer survey (Appendix A) to be administered later.
Appendices
Appendix A: Current Volunteer Survey
How did you find out about Healthier Jupiter? What prompted you to work with us?
Tell us a bit about your community involvement (i.e. volunteer or professional employment at a local nonprofit, organizations/affiliations, etc.)
What skills and assets do you hope to bring to your work with Healthier Jupiter? What are you hoping to gain or take away from your work?
What does Policy, Systems, and Environment Change mean to you? Is there anything about this work that seems unclear or confusing?
What about this work excites you? Set some intentions for this community/systems level work and your involvement in it.
References
Harp, E., Scherer, L. L., & Allen, J. A. (2017). Volunteer Engagement and Retention: Their Relationship to Community Service Self-Efficacy. Psychology Faculty Publications.
Haski-Leventhal, D., Oppenheimer, M., Holmes, K., Lockstone-Binney, L., Alony, I., & Ong, F. (2018). The Conceptualization of Volunteering Among Nonvolunteers: Using the Net-Cost Approach to Expand Definitions and Dimensions of Volunteering. Nonprofit and Voluntary Sector Quarterly, 48(2S), 30S–51S. https://doi.org/10.1177/0899764018768078
Heley, J., Yarker, S., & Jones, L. (2019). Volunteering in the bath? The rise of microvolunteering and implications for policy. Policy Studies, 1–14. https://doi.org/10.1080/01442872.2019.1645324
Lee, Y. J. (2019). Facebooking Alone? Millennials’ Use of Social Network Sites and Volunteering. Nonprofit and Voluntary Sector Quarterly, 49(1), 203–217. https://doi.org/10.1177/0899764019868844
Lee, Y. J., & Brudney, J. L. (2012). Participation in formal and informal volunteering: Implications for volunteer recruitment. Nonprofit Management and Leadership, 23(2), 159–180. https://doi.org/10.1002/nml.21060
Lott, M., & Story, M. (2019). The Future of Healthy Eating Research. Healthy Eating, Active Living: Reflections, Insights, and Considerations, 9-11. http://stanford.ebookhost.net/ssir/digital/63/ebook/1/download.pdf.
Palm Health Foundation. (2020). A Shared Purpose: Transforming Communities Through the Social Determinants of Health: Lessons learned from the first five years. Palm Health Foundation. https://irp-cdn.multiscreensite.com/29a08d35/files/uploaded/Healthier%20Together%20Paper_A%20Shared%20Purpose.pdf.
Palm Health Foundation. (n.d.). Who We Are. Palm Health Foundation. https://www.palmhealthfoundation.org/who-we-are.
Stebbins, R. A. (1996). Volunteering: A Serious Leisure Perspective. Nonprofit and Voluntary Sector Quarterly, 25(2), 211–224. https://doi.org/10.1177/0899764096252005