The "Aha" Moment
Macon, Georgia

The Problem

How can you find and engage large, underserved populations of families — for example, single-parent households or families in homeless shelters — if you’ve never worked with them as volunteers before?

The percentage of families in Macon, Ga., living under the poverty line is substantial: 21.6 percent. Splitting those family units into two groups, those led by two parents and those led by single mothers, reveals the incredible challenges that face one-parent households in this Southern community. According to Census data, 41.5 percent of Macon’s families led by single mothers are below the poverty line; in terms of single-mother families with children under the age of 5, that number jumps to 60 percent.

Gigi Rolfes, executive director of Volunteer Macon, took notice of the Macon area’s families and their struggles to stay financially solvent. What would she need to do to convince these families that working with Volunteer Macon was a worthwhile investment of their already thinly stretched time?

The Solution

At one of Volunteer Macon’s board meetings, a board member asked an interesting question: who were the people they served? After scanning data, the Volunteer Center quickly realized that they were limiting their outreach to Macon’s wealthier areas.  

“When we first started talking about family volunteering, most of the time it was for people of means who were looking for something to do over the holidays,” Rolfes admitted. “We never saw low-income families.” In order to rectify that, Rolfes started contacting local sites like homeless shelters and daycare centers, places that the Volunteer Center had previously viewed as recipients of service, and started asking advice on how to engage the families who used those resources.

How They Did It

Rolfes found that many of her existing programs were, structurally, easily adaptable to the special needs of low-income families. Volunteer Macon’s challenges, then, focused around engagement. “Putting something in the paper just doesn’t cut it,” said Rolfes; the Volunteer Center quickly discovered that personal, direct contact with local organizations that served low-income families was the best way to begin reaching out.

So staff members at Volunteer Macon started making house calls. They visited organizations in the greater Macon area and explained their volunteer programming and how they wanted to engage more low-income families. “A lot of the visits fell on deaf ears,” said Rolfes, but many of them didn’t.

Through personalized outreach to local organizations, Volunteer Macon was able to make connections with mentoring programs, homeless shelters, school systems, and local churches. Through the Neighboring grant, Volunteer Macon worked with two separate family populations — parents of children involved in local mentoring programs and families living at the Macon Rescue Mission, a local homeless shelter. All of these populations were engaged in service opportunities that gave families an opportunity to give back to their community. To ensure that local agencies also made the shift necessary to engage Macon’s underserved communities, Volunteer Macon trained more than 35 community based agency staff on how to engage low-income residents effectively in volunteering using the Neighboring: Engaging Low-Income Communities in Volunteering curriculum. Training participants reported learning how to implement family strengthening principles in their work to create meaningful partnerships with families and developing new skills to engage families as volunteers, not just recipients of services.

In addition to providing opportunities to serve, Volunteer Macon worked with families to learn about their priorities and needs by organizing town hall meetings that were followed up by trainings and workshops for families by area service providers on topics such as substance abuse, youth violence and developing parenting skills.

The Results

Volunteer Macon’s reach has gone beyond the Macon city limits, and now extends past county lines. With the strong relationships the Volunteer Center was able to create in the community, every agency or organization that Volunteer Macon linked with started helping with volunteer recruitment. Word-of-mouth networking meant that instead of a poster on a telephone pole or an ad in the newspaper, opportunities at Volunteer Macon were being presented to low-income families on a daily, personalized basis.

The effects of such advertising meant that outreach was possible to communities that Volunteer Macon had never anticipated engaging before. For example, families living in a local homeless shelter were especially eager to start serving with Volunteer Macon. According to Rolfes, their volunteer efforts were both a self-esteem boost and a way to break up traditional evening activities — namely, evenings at local churches and get-togethers. Said Rolfes, “They just didn’t want another Wednesday night social!” In one of several projects, more than 212 individuals and families helped prepare a Christmas meal together with the residents of Macon Rescue Mission and distributed holiday gifts.

Although the original motivation for engaging low-income volunteers was for community empowerment — “We want them to have that ‘aha!’ moment where they learn that they really can be engaged in things,” said Rolfes — ultimately, the “aha” moment belonged to Volunteer Macon and its partner agencies. Low-income families in the greater Macon area were already willing to serve; they just hadn’t ever had the opportunity before. Through specialized outreach and new partnering, Volunteer Macon was able to help create a network of agencies and organizations dedicated to engaging low-income families in service.

Lessons Learned

• Never underestimate the power of house calls. Volunteer Macon’s staff was successful in engaging so many new partners largely because of its unique way of approaching them. Especially if you have a program that may cause agencies to hesitate — such as engaging homeless families in volunteer service — a face-to-face encounter may be just enough to encourage participation.

• Let your partners share your responsibilities. The variety of volunteers that Volunteer Macon was able to engage was due to the success of their partner agencies’ word-of-mouth advertising. Your organization can’t be everywhere at once, but letting your partner agencies speak on your behalf lets you extend your reach.

• Don’t assume that just because a family’s already stretched thin, they don’t want to be volunteers. What Volunteer Macon found when they started engaging low-income community members was that they’d never been asked to serve before.

• Work with other community-based agencies and volunteer-based organizations to help them develop volunteer opportunities that tap into the skills of traditionally underserved and under engaged community residents. Agencies need to adapt their approaches if they want to reach new populations.

Resources

Neighboring: Engaging Low-Income Communities in Volunteering
Curriculum
Volunteer organizations often view residents of low-income communities as recipients of service rather than as agents of change. The reality is that many low-income residents volunteer and play a critical role in restoring the health of the neighborhoods where they live.

This curriculum focuses on how traditional volunteer organizations can build and maintain effective partnerships with low-income communities to engage volunteers in strengthening families and transforming neighborhoods. This course is designed to:

• Build the capacity of nonprofits and other groups to work with residents of low-income communities

• Increase the effectiveness of organizations in delivering services to low-income communities, particularly though volunteering

• Equip organizations with the understanding, capacity and motivation to better serve low-income communities

To learn more about this curriculum, send an e-mail to training@PointsofLight.org.

Now in the third year of its grant, the Points of Light Foundation’s Strengthening Communities AmeriCorps*VISTA Initiative engages 75 VISTAs across the country to focus on family strengthening, faith-based initiatives, disaster readiness, youth at risk and the Earned Income Tax Credit. Volunteer Macon’s work has included VISTAs from this grant for the past two years; now, in year three, they’re expanding their VISTA program even more.

Contact Information

To find out more about Volunteer Macon’s programming and how they engaged low-income communities, contact Gigi Rolfes at volmacon@bellsouth.net.