Five Good Ideas to attract and keep volunteers

Volunteer participation has dropped since the pandemic – but community needs haven’t. If you’re struggling to recruit or retain volunteers, you’re not alone.

On March 30, 2026 Megan Conway, President and CEO of Volunteer Canada, shared five practical ideas on how to re-engage your volunteer community and attract new supporters. Drawing from the new National Volunteer Action Strategy, Megan looked at how to meet the changing needs and motivations of today’s volunteers, remove barriers that keep people from participating, and reconnect with those who have volunteered with you in the past.

You’ll leave with ready-to-use ideas – and help build momentum and passion for how we can collectively contribute to making volunteering something that’s core to Canada’s current nation-building efforts.

Session handout 

Five Good Ideas

1. Design volunteering for belonging, not just help
2. Treat access to volunteering as a design and equity issue
3. Reframe volunteering as contribution, skill building, and participation
4. Invest in volunteer infrastructure as a public good
5. Make volunteering visible in civic leadership and policy

Resources

• National Volunteer Action Strategy. (2025). Findings.
• Statistics Canada. (2023). Survey on Giving, Volunteering and Participating.
• Volunteer Alberta and Volunteer Canada. (2025). Volunteer Participation Survey.
• Volunteer Alberta. (2025). Bringing Meaning to the Volunteer Experience: Insights on What Motivates, Sustains and Challenges Volunteers.
• Volunteer Alberta and InWithForward. (2025). (Re)Engaged: Volunteerism from the Ground Up.
• Tamarack Institute. (2020). Tool: Planning Your Backbone Support.
• Tamarack Institute webinar. (2020). Collective Impact Backbones: What We Are Learning.
• OECD. (2024). Survey on Drivers of Trust in Public Institutions – 2024 Results.
• OECD. (2024). OECD Youth Policy Toolkit.
• World Economic Forum. (2025). New Economy Skills: Unlocking the Human Advantage.
• World Economic Forum. (2025). Future of Jobs Report 2025.

Transcript

This transcript has been edited for clarity.

Elizabeth McIsaac (President of Maytree): Many of you will be familiar with this scenario.

Volunteer participation has dropped since the pandemic, but community needs have not.

If you’re struggling to recruit or retain volunteers, you are not alone. And today, we are joined by Dr. Megan Conway.

As President and CEO of Volunteer Canada, she’s well-placed to share her ideas on how to re-engage your volunteer community and attract new supporters.

In her presentation, Megan will look at how to meet the changing needs and motivations of today’s volunteers. She’ll present ideas on how to remove barriers that keep people from participating and reconnect with those who have volunteered with you in the past.

It is my pleasure to invite Megan to join us, and welcome to you. So glad to have you here today.

Megan Conway: Thanks so much, Elizabeth. I want to start by saying a sincere thank you to the Maytree Foundation for shining a light on this important issue and facilitating this conversation.

As Elizabeth shared, my name is Megan Conway, and I’m the President and CEO of Volunteer Canada, the national leadership body that advances volunteerism and participation.

I’m calling today from the unceded territory of the Anishinaabeg people on the shores of the Ottawa River.

I want to talk today about declining rates of participation and what can be done about it.

In particular, I want to talk about what we can do as individuals, in organizations, and more collectively.

I’ll start with a little bit about why I think this issue matters, particularly at this moment.

And then I’ll shift to talking more concretely about five good ideas.

So, as I start, I wonder if we could reflect on how or why volunteering and participation matter.

From my perspective, it’s the basis of caring relationships in our communities, and, more specifically, it’s a proxy for the quality or nature of our democracy.

It’s a measure of how connected and engaged we are in building the kinds of communities in the country we want to see.

Personally, I grew up learning about service, not as a program, or a policy lever, or even as a resume builder, but as a way of life, mostly by watching the people around me.

My father was a Rotary Club member and played a leadership role in running our annual community fair. That meant long evenings and planning meetings, coordinating volunteers, setting things up, staying late and cleaning until the very end.

My mom served as a school board trustee and has also spent much of her life advocating for improved healthcare.

I watched her sit at our kitchen table after dinner, reading binders of material, then head out to meetings where decisions affected families she knew personally.

My grandmother volunteered as president of the hospital auxiliary, quietly organizing fundraisers, recruiting volunteers, and showing up week after week so the hospital could better serve the community. Let me tell you, there were so many banquets and so much fundraising to help improve facilities in our rural community.

None of this was framed as exceptional, and no one called it altruism or civic heroism.

It was simply understood as part of being part of the community. Caring for one another was expected, and leadership and service were inseparable.

I also recognized that I learned this from a place of privilege. I had time, stability, encouragement, and role models who made contributions visible and valued.

I grew up surrounded by institutions, schools, service clubs, and public bodies that invited participation and assumed that ordinary people had something to offer.

While I came from a place of privilege, I’m also mindful that the modelling that I experienced as a young person matters a lot.

So think for a moment as we get started. Where did you learn, or how did you learn to contribute?

Who taught you? How did you come to experience it?

Increasingly, what I’m most struck by is that volunteering does not emerge spontaneously.

It is learned. It is reinforced.

The number one thing I hear from a broad cross-section of Canadians is that they desperately want to participate, but that they do not know how.

Volunteering is shaped, often quietly and invisibly, by the systems, structures, and cultural norms that surround us.

And frankly, as many of us here know, the systems that supported volunteer participation in Canada, the systems that many of us grew up with, were largely built in the 1970s, 80s, and 90s.

They assume stable employment, predictable schedules, long, strong local institutions, and enough slack or capacity in people’s lives to give time regularly and continuously.

Volunteering fit around work because work was more predictable, and it fit around family life because caregiving structures looked different.

And volunteering fit within relatively stable community institutions.

Today, we’re asking those same systems to operate in a profoundly different context.

Work is far more precarious, caregiving complexities are heavier and more complex, and I can say that, as having two children and a busy life, costs of living have risen sharply as we all experience, and digital life competes for attention and energy.

And inequities in who has access to the time, opportunity, and influence are increasingly visible.

The values have not disappeared, but the design no longer fits the conditions.

When participation systems are not built and resourced for the lives that people are actually living, we don’t lose generosity, we lose participation. We lose belonging, and, over time, we weaken the connective tissue that holds communities and our overall democracy together.

As many of you might be aware, Statistics Canada’s General Social Survey shows that formal volunteering declined from 41% of Canadians in 2018 to 32% in 2023, while total volunteer hours fell by more than a quarter.

Informal volunteering fell as well, particularly among women and caregivers.

And you can check all of those resources out on the Canadian Knowledge Hub for Giving and Volunteering, which I referenced.

These are not marginal changes; they represent a structural contraction of Canada’s civic capacity.

I’d underscore that those of you deeply engaged as volunteer engagers in your organization, utilizing an awareness of data and trends, like those on the Canadian Knowledge Hub, will help you in your capacity to plan better volunteer engagement and recruitment programs.

At an organizational level, this means fewer volunteers, increased reliance on a shrinking core of long-serving individuals, also evident in the StatsCan data, and there are higher rates of burnout and growing difficulty sustaining programs.

At a community level, it means fewer entry points into participation and fewer opportunities to build trust across difference. That’s an especially important point that I’ll circle back to at different points as we connect today.

So the question before us, then, is not whether Canadians still care.

The question is whether our systems still make it possible for people to live out that care in the ways that are meaningful, equitable, and sustainable.

The five ideas that follow are offered in that spirit, not as a call to restore the past or to individualize blame, because, as I know and appreciate, nostalgia’s not an option, but I offer these as a framework for rebuilding volunteering as essential civic infrastructure in the Canada we are living now.

When volunteering works well, it gives people something increasingly rare: a place to belong beyond their private lives.

For many Canadians, volunteering is one of the few remaining spaces where people of different ages, backgrounds, and lived experiences come together around shared purpose.

It’s where people learn how decisions are made, how disagreements are navigated, how responsibility is shared, and how collective outcomes are produced.

In this sense, volunteering has always been one of our most accessible civic training grounds.

Yet we rarely describe it that way.

We tend to talk about volunteering as help.

Helping a program run, helping an organization cope, helping people in need.

But beneath that surface is something more structural.

Volunteering is where people practise participation.

It’s where informal leadership develops, and it’s where trust is built across differences.

This matters because many of the pressures we are experiencing as a society, and we can think about tons of them: polarization, isolation, and declining trust.

They’re not only political problems, they’re participation problems.

When people have fewer opportunities to contribute meaningfully to sharing life, they withdraw.

They narrow their focus to survival and immediate networks.

They lose confidence that institutions are responsive to their voice, or that their voice matters.

Volunteering, as many of us know, has historically been one of the ways Canadians stay connected to civic life.

It allowed people to practise citizenship in everyday ways, through service clubs, schools, hospital associations, cultural organizations, faith communities, and neighbourhood initiatives.

It offered low-barrier entry points into public life.

When fewer people feel able to participate, and when contribution becomes concentrated among a shrinking group of reliable volunteers, we don’t just lose capacity, we lose diversity of voice, we lose intergenerational connection, and we lose everyday experiences of shared responsibilities.

This shows up quietly and powerfully. Boards that struggle to renew, programs designed for professionals that are no longer shaped by participants, young people who care deeply about social issues but don’t see a welcoming place to enter, and older adults who want to remain engaged but feel sidelined or underutilized.

Over time, fewer shared civic spaces mean fewer opportunities to build trust across difference, and that has consequences not only for community organizations, but for social cohesion and democratic resilience.

That’s why volunteering should be understood not as a side activity, but as core civic infrastructure, part of the scaffolding that supports participation, belonging, and a shared responsibility in democratic society.

So I’m going to get rolling more concretely on five concrete things that we can do collectively to shift declining trends in participation and volunteerism.

So, idea number one, design volunteering for belonging, not just help.

As many of us know, for decades, volunteer systems have been designed primarily around efficacy, reliability, and risk.

I’m sure none of us on this call have heard anything about risk management. So much risk management. Roles are tightly scoped, commitments are fixed, and your shift … we shift all of this time … from time to time, cycle to cycle.

Expectations remain clearly bounded, and success becomes measured in hours logged, sheets filled, shifts filled, and tasks completed.

And those approaches made sense at one point in time, but they increasingly failed to reflect human realities.

As a parent working two part-time jobs who wants to help at their child’s school, for example, they can’t commit to weekday volunteering. A newcomer might want to help develop professional skills that they’ve used in another country but are looking for an entry point into the Canadian job market, for instance.

They’re looking to use their skills and talent in a different way. And retired professionals, for instance, have a whole other value set that they’re looking to contribute to when they volunteer.

In each of the above cases, the issue isn’t motivation; it’s much more about design.

Where the greatest amount of innovation is being tested is in new models that shift out of this practice: micro-volunteering, team volunteering, project or skills-based approaches. There are tons of examples that I can reference for my time, or in my network, or throughout the network of Volunteer Canada, which are examples of how organizations are building new capacity in small ways.

Belonging doesn’t grow out of compliance or transactions; it grows out of relationships, trust, shared purpose, and agency. And people stay engaged because they are needed, not just because they are needed, but because they feel they matter.

And this comes down directly to the systems that you build around volunteer engagement to create a sense of welcome.

What are the policies and the practices that you’re creating? How are they rooted in a place of welcome and belonging?

What kinds of resources are you building, and do you have a leader of volunteers engaged in some capacity to help?

I personally love the term leader of volunteer engagement, which short form stands for love. I would really encourage folks on the call, if you’re not engaged to that network, find a way to get engaged to the Volunteer Management Professionals of Canada. They have lots of resources.

As well, find a local volunteer centre in your community that might help offer greater resources or training, or reach out to Volunteer Canada to find a volunteer centre in your community.

Designing for belonging requires a shift in organizational mindset. It means asking how people experience participation, not just how the organization benefits from it.

It means treating volunteers not as labour to be managed, but as contributors to feel welcomed, listened to, and supported. It’s a pretty significant shift in our mindset around how we think about how to welcome people into our shared work and purpose.

In organizations that design for belonging, roles are often co-created rather than assigned. Volunteers are invited into conversations about what matters and how work gets done.

Feedback flows both ways, and learning is mutual.

These practices take time and intention, but they build deeper commitment and resilience.

One of the biggest challenges we hear about is the lack of receptive capacity in charities and nonprofits.

And so I just want to underscore here that doing this hard design work takes a lot of time and energy. Individuals often tell us that they reach out to an organization, but that they don’t hear back for weeks or months.

That isn’t a failure of the organization, but rather of the ways we build capacity and resources in volunteer-led organizations, so I just want to underscore that that’s a structural issue.

Designing for belonging also requires comfort with flexibility, and rigid systems often feel safer, but they often exclude people whose lives are complex.

Flexibility signals trust, and trust is foundational to belonging.

As many of us know, research on social capital shows that participation strengthens trust and cohesion only when it is experienced as reciprocal and meaningful, rather than as extractive.

Lots of research from the Canadian design perspective echoes this finding.

When unpaid roles start to resemble professional workloads without professional supports, people disengage – even when their desire to contribute remains strong.

This leads to a critical leadership insight.

The most important design question is no longer how do we design volunteer roles, but rather, what experience are we intentionally creating for the people who show up?

Designing volunteering for belonging is not a soft or sentimental choice; it’s a structural decision that determines who participates, who stays, and who feels they belong.

And that takes a lot of energy and commitment, and, ultimately, resourcing if we want to get it right.

So I’m going to shift now to talk about good idea number two, which is treating access to volunteering as a design and equity issue.

And as many of us know, volunteering has never been equally accessible.

Participation requires time, transportation, predictable schedules, digital access, and the ability to absorb unpaid costs.

For people managing caregiving, precarious work, disability, or settlement in a new country, these costs add up quickly.

Too often, these barriers are framed as individual shortcomings. People are too busy, hard to reach, or not engaged.

In reality, this is a systems failure.

Equity in volunteering is not just about removing barriers after the fact, it’s about how people are designed for from the outset.

This becomes especially clear when we look at youth and older adults.

Young people are navigating education, early careers, debt, and a lot of uncertainty.

Many deeply care about social issues, but can realistically only commit to short, bounded opportunities.

When volunteering is framed as open-ended or long-term, youth often self-select out. Not because they don’t care, but because the opportunity does not fit their reality.

Older adults, particularly those transitioning into retirement, often seek meaning and connection in a whole bunch of different ways.

I love the new work around the purposeful third act, so I’d encourage you to take a quick look at that new resource, which I’ve just become familiar with, but at the same time, older adults are often caring for partners, or grandchildren or aging parents themselves.

They bring deep experience but often encounter systems that value availability over wisdom.

At Volunteer Canada, one of the most exciting initiatives we’re working on is called GenerationsCo, which is about how to intentionally design engagement with older adults and youth at the centre of opportunities.

And I’ll just, like, stay tuned for some research that we’re going to publish in the spring called The Silver Shift.

It talks about older adult motivations and the barriers they face to participation.

One of the interesting facts I recently found out through that research is that older adults are the least likely to be asked to participate, but that when they are asked, they are the ones that give the most amount of time, and I think that’s something we all collectively need to be thinking about around how to change.

I’d also reference OECD Youth Policy Toolkit and resources, or some of the work that Ilona Dougherty is doing out of the University of Waterloo to talk a little bit more deeply about youth motivations.

Equity-informed design recognizes all of these realities, and it creates short-term and episodic roles alongside longer commitments. It values mentoring, governance, and advisory contributions as much as hands-on tasks.

And it removes participation costs where possible and simplifies onboarding.

It’s especially true when we think about supporting low-income communities to participate. We need to think much more mindfully and concretely about childcare and food costs, and addressing barriers limiting participation.

When organizations intentionally design for roles for different life stages, short-term projects, mentoring, shared commitments, etc., participation improves.

And when they don’t, organizations rely on the same small group of people whose lives happen to fit around outdated assumptions.

Beyond this, it means getting exceptionally creative with the volunteer who is at the centre of the volunteer experience.

It isn’t just about age and stage; it’s also about interests and motivations. And some of the really great research that I would flag for everyone on this call today is a great resource that’s been built in partnership between Volunteer Alberta and InWithForward that references re-engaged volunteerism from the ground up.

And it’s a really great snapshot of not just the demographic that a person represents, but also how their volunteer engagement interests come up against a certain number of different types of profiles, and how we need to think much more creatively around designing for the profile, not just age and stage alone.

At the end of the day, these aren’t just recruitment problems; they become broader systems design problems.

The most important equity question you as a leader can ask is not who isn’t volunteering, but why existing models make participation easier for some and much, much harder for others.

Okay, now moving on to good idea number three.

This is all about skill building, and it’s reframing volunteerism as contribution, and as a skill-building opportunity.

For much of the last century, volunteering has been framed as generous but optional, something people do after their real work is finished.

And frankly, that narrative no longer reflects reality.

Global research on skills and lifelong learning shows that people increasingly develop core capabilities, communication, leadership, collaboration, and adaptability, through experiential and community-based learning.

Volunteering is one of the most consistent, yet under-recognized sites of these kinds of learning opportunities.

The Future of Jobs report from the World Economic Forum pulls on some of these threads.

Yet we’re missing a sizable systems gap here in Canada when we think about how to better incorporate a skills agenda into volunteering.

I would strongly encourage you to think about how to centre a skills and career development conversation into the work as you design opportunities for folks in your organization.

Think creatively around how you tap into pro bono opportunities, especially with different employers around your organization or in your network.

Think about ways that you can lean more concretely on organizations through employer-supported volunteering and put skills at the centre of that employer-supported volunteering opportunity.

Increasingly, we’re starting a renewed conversation at Volunteer Canada about how to learn from partners like Taproot Foundation, for example, about what they’re advancing with regards to human capital development as a core component of volunteering and participation.

And I think there’s much to be learned about how to centre that much more squarely in conversations around roles and responsibilities, both in the organizations that you work for, but also in the broader sector.

Think about the care economy, for instance.

Volunteering is often the first instance that young people learn about caring in more formal, organized settings.

Imagine what could be scaled if we thought much more deliberately around how to strengthen that at scale.

Volunteer-acquired skills remained largely invisible, however, in the hiring and career development opportunities that exist.

And when volunteering doesn’t count, people disengage.

Reframing volunteering as a contribution is not symbolic work; it changes how organizations design roles and how employers value experience, and how individuals understand their own worth.

When volunteer experience is recognized as legitimate learning, it opens doors rather than simply filling gaps, and this is especially true when we think about the employment and career development landscape that we all exist in.

We know, and I know personally, that volunteering has helped me as a young person build skills and confidence, and test out my identity. Who was it that I wanted to be in the world?

The same is true for newcomers who are looking for skills and experience within a Canadian context.

But I think we have to think much more concretely around how we build those skills and experiences out for the individual, and then how we work collectively at scale to make that volunteering experience matter. Not just for the individual, but for the kinds of communities we want to create.

And this reframing really matters at a collective level.

When contribution is defined narrowly as paid employment, large segments of civic effort become invisible.

Care, community leadership, mutual aid, and governance become treated as secondary despite their foundational role in social well-being.

Recognizing volunteering as contribution invites a broader, more inclusive definition of productivity.

One that reflects how societies actually function. And it also aligns volunteering more clearly with citizenship, rather than just charity.

Volunteering is not a spare-time activity; it’s how people build dignity and how they maintain connection, and it’s how people practise citizenship outside of formal institutions.

Idea number four. Invest in volunteer infrastructure as a public good.

Volunteering does not run on goodwill alone, and I can’t tell you how many times I have had to say that in all sorts of settings since I’ve become the CEO of Volunteer Canada.

Volunteer engagement and volunteerism depend on infrastructure, trained volunteer coordinators, trained onboarding opportunities, mentorship, digital platforms, data systems, and overall care for volunteer well-being.

Yet this infrastructure is often under-resourced and exceptionally fragile. It’s funded through short-term grants, absorbed into already stretched roles, or treated as overhead to be minimized.

As we all know, that results in burnout, churn, and a whole bunch of lost trust.

Outcomes we would never accept in other systems we consider essential.

I want to be really clear that infrastructure here is not about overhead.

Infrastructure is what makes participation possible at scale and over time.

Investing in volunteer infrastructure is recognition that volunteering is not free. It requires coordination, care, community, and intention. It also requires professional expertise in many instances.

Volunteer engagement is a skilled practice, not an administrative afterthought.

And governments and other stakeholders can support sustainability by, for example, engaging in youth, or expanding the capacity of volunteer centres, or building data capacity in use, modernizing training programs, and investing in training, screening, and support for governance systems at scale.

When infrastructure is strong, organizations are better able to design inclusive roles, support volunteers through life transitions, respond to crises, and sustain participation beyond moments of urgency.

Yet when infrastructure is weak, volunteering becomes episodic, extractive, and fragile.

Trading volunteer infrastructure as a public good also creates opportunities for shared platforms, common standards, and regional or national coordination, reducing duplication and strengthening the overall civic ecosystem.

This is much of what the work of the National Volunteering Action Strategy is about, and I would encourage you to check out the website volunteerstrategy.ca and reach out to get more involved in that process.

Idea number five, and I promise we’re rounding the corner here, make volunteering visible in civic leadership and policy.

What we measure and name signals what we value.

When volunteering is invisible in policy, it becomes fragile, relied upon in crises, overlooked in planning, and assumed rather than supported. Visibility matters because it creates legitimacy.

When volunteering is named in policy frameworks, data strategies, and public leadership narratives, it becomes easy to justify, and much easier to justify investment, coordination, and innovation. And it becomes easier to connect volunteering to priorities such as workforce development, newcomer integration, healthy aging, and community resilience.

National coordination matters because it allows us to treat volunteering as part of Canada’s civic foundation.

Not as an afterthought, it allows learning to be shared, gaps to be identified, and participation to be strengthened across regions and sectors. And I would encourage you all to find ways that you can be advocating to make volunteering visible in your own local context. I think that’s where we get to see the ability to scale bigger changes.

It’s from starting local, making the opportunities very visible in your local context, and then working as a volunteer-engaged movement to really talk about why this matters at scale.

Making volunteering visible is not about centralization; it is about coherence and recognizing that the millions of individual acts of contribution add up to a system that deserves care, attention, and leadership.

So, rebuilding volunteering as civic infrastructure can feel abstract until we can see how these ideas show up in everyday practice.

And I firmly believe that, across Canada, small design shifts are already producing outsized results.

Organizations that replace year-long commitments with clearly defined projects are seeing higher participation from youth and mid-career adults.

Those that invest in skilled volunteer engagement staff report lower turnover and stronger relationships with community members, and municipalities that integrate volunteering into community well-being and workforce strategies are better positioned to respond to crises because those networks already exist.

Importantly, these changes do not require perfection or scale to begin; they require intentionality.

They require leaders like yourselves to ask different questions, funders to value capacity alongside outcomes, and institutions to see participation as something to be stewarded rather than extracted.

This is how systems change, not through a single reform, but through many aligned decisions that make it easier for people to show up, contribute, and ultimately stay.

So as I shift, I want to just talk about how we can move from this place of crisis that we all feel like we’re sitting in to a place of shared civic stewardship.

Canada, as we all know, is facing a real crisis in volunteering and participation, but as I flagged, this isn’t about a failure of generosity; it’s a failure of design.

Responding to this moment requires leadership at individual, organizational, and systems levels.

We need to think about how we steward that collectively. We need to really lean on governments, funders, employers, and community organizations to recognize volunteering as essential civic infrastructure and to act accordingly.

This means investing in volunteer coordination and support, not just the programs. It also means designing roles that reflect real lives, particularly youth, families, and older adults, and it means changing how we talk, ultimately how we describe volunteering, from something about a charitable contribution to being much more about civics participation.

More importantly, it means recognizing that belonging does not happen by accident; it’s built through system structures and everyday opportunities to contribute meaningfully.

It’s one of the many ways that Canadians can turn into belonging and leadership as an act of nation building.

If we want volunteering to remain a defining feature of Canadian civic life, leaders across all sectors must act now.

Governments must treat volunteering as part of Canada’s social infrastructure, integrating into policy frameworks related to community development, employment, immigration, and well-being. And funders must invest in volunteer infrastructure, coordinating, training, and digital tools.

All of these things are small examples; they can’t be treated as short-term projects, but broader opportunities.

At an organizational level, we must think about how we redesign volunteer roles for belonging, flexibility, and equity – really, really recognizing and centring on the lived realities of the participant in that design process.

And employers and institutions must recognize volunteer-acquired skills as real skills and legitimate forms of learning and contribution.

At the end of the day, this isn’t about asking people to give more.

It’s about designing systems that make contributions possible.

Thank you.

Elizabeth McIsaac: Thank you. There’s so much in there.

And I just love the shift. The shift that you’re moving us from charity to civic participation, from extraction to contribution. It’s another way of framing volunteerism that I haven’t heard in such a complete way, so I think this is just a huge value-add. People are absolutely engaging in the chat.

But before I pick up on any questions from the Q&A, you mentioned the National Volunteer Action Strategy. And in fact, Megan, that’s when you reached out to me a few months ago to talk about that and say, how can we sort of work together or think alongside each other on that?

I wonder if you could talk a little bit about where you’re at with that. What’s that looking like? And how do we across the country engage in that?

Megan Conway: Thank you, Elizabeth, for sure. The Volunteer Action Strategy is underway at the moment, and I would direct people to the website volunteerstrategy.ca. We have been really deep into a whole series of community consultations and research and talking to a broad cross-section of employers and volunteers themselves and volunteer-led organizations.

We are also working closely with our working group called Volunteering Matters, which is made up of provincial and territorial representatives.

And we’re at the stage of taking all of that data, condensing it into a series of recommendations, and then we’re going to be launching those recommendations at some point over the summer. So I would encourage folks to take a look at that site and check out the What We’re Hearing reports.

I think we’re at a pivotal moment of making a change from the development to a launch phase, and then from launch to implementation. So that’s, I would say, where we are in that process, and it’s still a great opportunity for folks to jump in, provide feedback, and take a look at what’s been developed so far.

And ultimately, I think it’s going to require a broad scale, mobilization effort to put this on the radar of broad decision makers. So the National Volunteer Action Strategy isn’t about a strategy for Volunteer Canada. It’s really us backboning this work, and looking at what a volunteerism and participation strategy would look like for Canada.

And we think that, at this moment, it’s an especially big opportunity for us to think about how we really elevate volunteerism, service, participation into the culture of what it means to be a Canadian, and how we really connect this to the broader nation-building effort that seems to be afoot. Not just making it about economic policy only, but also about how volunteering and participation are part of civic and social policy.

So we’re really also thinking about how to move and mobilize government around the work also. But yes, get involved at the website, check it out there. If you have questions, reach out to the team, and I would also just say that, over the summer, we’re going to be launching that data, and we would love it if individuals had a desire to help reach out and find ways to connect locally, for sure. Yeah.

Elizabeth McIsaac: Terrific, because, as you say, this is about building infrastructure, and so that’s going to take many, many hands, and engagement.

You’ve mentioned that this is sometimes a pathway for young people or for newcomers to sort of gaining entry to the labour market, and sort of a stepping stone, but that raises questions around exploitation and ensuring that the opportunity is, in fact, one that is decent work, that is recognizing and engaging people, and making them feel like they belong. So, can you sort of take us or navigate us through that edge a little bit?

Megan Conway: Yeah, for sure. I think the question of “is it work” or “is it volunteering” is a really important question to think about, no matter where you’re coming from in the organization that you represent.

Ourselves and ONN did a series of research a couple of years ago, just understanding the difference between work, what’s a work opportunity, and what’s a volunteering opportunity, and helping organizations with that delineation. So, I’m happy to send those resources around after the fact that help organizations with a concrete tool to understand the difference there between work and volunteering.

The other thing I would just think about is, increasingly, we are seeing examples where volunteers, while they’re not workers, need to be thought of under the same kind of framework that would govern an employee. So, we need to think about how we’re treating people with the right level of framing what the responsibilities are, the expectations, the clarity on when the role starts and stops, and who their main point of contact is. Some of the very basics around how you would design a role or an opportunity within an employment context also pertain to how you would design a role or an opportunity within a volunteer context.

And that means all the various ways that you need to think about treating people fairly, about how you interview people, all of those pieces. And someone’s put in the chat, yes, volunteers are human resources, so we need to use that same kind of lens as we think about individuals, and we need to make sure we’re delineating between whether or not it’s work, or a volunteer role, and then how we’re treating that role, and the supports that are in place to support that individual, so important to think about all of those pieces.

Elizabeth McIsaac: A number of people sent in questions in advance around what the right policies and procedures are. Do we have actual work contracts? And I think it’s to your point around: This is a design question, and it’s about the intention of being clear about expectations and having those kinds of systems in place. And so I think that takes care of some of that.

Megan Conway: Hmm.

Elizabeth McIsaac: Presumably, there are good examples out there for people to look at.

Megan Conway: There are tons of good examples. The thing I would just flag is that we’re in a moment right now where, in partnership with other sector partners like the VMPC (Volunteer Management Professionals of Canada) and others, we’re renewing and redesigning the Canadian Code for volunteer involvement, and so that is a good tool that also speaks about roles and responsibilities.

But it’s in a moment right now where it’s getting renewed, which is exciting, and we plan to have that launched more broadly in the coming months, but it has good resources also, and the existing Canadian Code for Volunteer Involvement is a good tool, a resource that I would encourage folks to check out, because it does help with the framing of all of that in a concrete way, for sure.

Elizabeth McIsaac: So part of that, just going along that line, you’re bringing people in to do work in an organization, and you also have paid staff in an organization. That can lead to some tensions around which role is which. Are there examples of how to create a good environment where staff buy-in are part of the engagement around it? And where they are not threatened, perhaps, by the presence of volunteers or encroaching on their turf, so to speak?

Megan Conway: Yeah, that’s a good question. Again, I come back to the roles and responsibilities conversation. I would also suggest, thinking creatively around, you know, how do you create welcome in organizations?

I think as soon as we get into thinking about turf, we’re creating a sense of barriers and walls, rather than a place of how we foster engagement and a broader sense of welcoming across the organization.

The other thing is, it comes down to how we support someone’s motivation to get involved, and how do we have a sense of what the boundaries or the scope or the framing of what is within an organizational context?

I also often remind folks that organizations that are well resourced and have lots of staff are kind of different entities than those that are completely volunteer led. And so there, you know, I think the latest stat says that 53% of organizations within the charitable sector have no paid staff.

So I think, you know, thinking about those as different kinds of organizations is helpful, as we think about how we design engagement and an opportunity for individuals who want to get involved and connected, and then getting clear on how we think about creating welcome within the organization, and how do we orientate people?

I think orientation is a huge piece of the puzzle: How are we recruiting people? Are we just recruiting for same-same, or are we recruiting intentionally for difference. I think is a really important question?

And then how are we getting a proxy perspective on what difference actually looks like? You know, rather than basing it on our own assumptions.

The other thing I would just sort of flag here is that I think language and how we talk about these issues matter a lot.

One of the other big realities is how we think about how we engage with diverse ethnocultural communities. I think we have to get much more connected in equity and, you know, a very informed approach to accessibility and equity, and think about the language we’re using to talk about volunteering and participation in ways that matter for the communities that we want to work with, rather than relying on standardized or our constructs around talking about volunteering and participation.

So I think it looks very different, yeah.

Elizabeth McIsaac: It does look very different, and to be clear, that takes very intentional, deliberate work for that readiness. It’s not something then you just sort of spin out, but you actually do this with care and with preparation and the investment in order to make it work well.

Megan Conway: Yeah, yeah, for sure, and I also think the other thing your comment touches on a little bit is, you know, I think having good, clear conflict resolution policies in place also within your organization makes a difference. So, having clarity around the role of the staff and  the role of the volunteers is really important. Having clear descriptions and role descriptions is super important.

I would always tell a volunteer, never jump into a volunteer opportunity unless there’s a clearly defined role and responsibility that’s been outlined to you.

And the same is true for staff. I think, you know, that decent work conversation is really important. And then, you know, many of us are stretched, so if we don’t have capacity, we don’t often have time to absorb creativity or new ideas in organizations.

So how do you build actual concrete time to hear from a volunteer, to talk to a volunteer, and to reach out to new communities where you might want to build new bridges? I think those are all things that require capacity. Sometimes capacity isn’t always in huge supply – in organizations that are working on the front line, especially.

Elizabeth McIsaac: Yeah, and just another context for it. I think we’ve already answered it, but one of the questions sent in was, do you have tips on how to engage new volunteers on boards and committees when it’s been the same people over a long period of time? And to your point, it’s a design, a reframe, and a readiness, to think through those questions.

Megan Conway: It’s also about creating learning opportunities and orientation opportunities to the work of a board or a governance structure. I definitely know that the board governance question is one that many organizations struggle with. How do we recruit new people to this organization at the board level?

The way to think about that is, how are you intentionally designing for learning and relationship building with people who you might want to be sitting on the board? You know, waiting till the time that you need to do board renewal is waiting a little too long. You need to think about it as an ongoing cycle of relationship building.  Or is there committee work, or are there other ways to invest in building people’s connectivity to the organization beyond just the standardized, we’re going to put something up on our website and recruit board members that way, you know?

And that all takes time, and a lot of really good, thoughtful, intentional relationship-building at all levels of the organization, from the board itself, through the CEO or executive director, right across the whole organization. And, creatively thinking around how to design roles and responsibilities at the board level is important as well for really forward-thinking boards, I would say.

Elizabeth McIsaac: On a slightly separate direction. Very often we want to provide recognition for volunteers. Sometimes it’s through an honorarium, sometimes it’s through some kind of payment. That begins to straddle a different set of conditions. Do you have insights or advice on handling that as part of the equation of the relationship with volunteers?

Megan Conway: That’s a great question. We generally encourage folks to think about addressing barriers to participation in any kind of honoraria or any kind of model that might address hardship, for instance, or just basic barriers, you know, like transportation costs, etc.

When you start to lean into the compensation mode, you’re not in a space of volunteering anymore, Elizabeth, so I would really caution folks against this question of compensation. I think it’s very different when it gets framed in terms of “we’re going to address a barrier,” but compensation looks different. And then that bleeds into paid work, which I think is what we are not encouraging here.

The other thing I would just flag, which is what you sort of referenced in your comments just around volunteer recognition. Thinking about how you are designing for recognition over the lifespan of that volunteer’s time with your organization really matters. Rooting it in the relationship piece is really important, and thinking about recognition that really is relevant and matters to that individual is really key. So just that whole design piece is critical.

Just a little plug; it’s the International Year of the Volunteer this year. The last time this happened when it was in 2001, and I’m continuously advocating for how Canada might recognize its volunteers and the contributions of Canada’s 24 million volunteers, because I think it has to go beyond just surface-level stuff.

Elizabeth McIsaac: An increasingly popular form of volunteerism that employers get behind is this employee-supported volunteering, paid staff helping out, in their free time. And this can be a burden to small organizations, and it’s not always meaningful, necessarily, to the employees themselves.

Do you have any thoughts on whether this is a good idea, or in what context it can be a good idea?

Megan Conway: We have a whole team of folks that actually support and broker connectivity between charities and nonprofits and employers, and a lot of work happens around the employee-supported volunteering piece. We do produce a lot of insights around best practices that make sure that the volunteering is not extractive.

And that it’s really rooted in what communities need, and that there’s been an investment in that community, at a deeper level.

I would also just really highlight the importance of recognizing that for many individuals, employee-supported volunteering is their first moment where they actually learn about what it means to volunteer.

So, we often forget about the fact that for many who become lifelong volunteers, their first experience volunteering may be through an employer who has supported their opportunity to volunteer. So, I would come back to thinking about the fact that employer-supported volunteering should also have policies and practices behind it.

You know, some great examples are providing paid time for staff to actually engage in volunteering initiatives that matter to them, for instance, as part of a HR policy set, for example. But I think we have to think about how do we build bridges between the charitable sector and employers or corporations in meaningful ways, and how do we do it in ways that aren’t extractive? And how do we think about investing in community capacity, alongside supporting employees to learn about need in the community, learn about what happens in the community, and move beyond?

There’s a time and a place for a one-day event, Elizabeth, but it needs to be designed and facilitated in really meaningful ways.

And so I would just suggest that we have a ton of resources at Volunteer Canada. We’re happy to support, and we really see the value of building capacity, both in the community context, but also with employers, so that there is a good, a good match, and that it’s not extractive.

Elizabeth McIsaac: This is a longer question, but I think it’s worth reading, and it goes to the theme that we hear in everything: How do we deal with the new world of remote?

So, Sarah writes, I love that the first good idea is to place belonging at the centre of the design for volunteerism. I work with volunteers who largely work off-site, mentoring or driving children and families in the community, so I do find it challenging to find ways to help them feel that they belong to one another and to the volunteer services department, particularly post-pandemic, where volunteers seem more reluctant to come out in person, to in-person opportunities.

Are you hearing about great ideas about how belonging is created in agencies where people are not always meeting face-to-face? How do we do remote volunteerism and create belonging?

Megan Conway: Hmm, I love that question, so thank you to Sarah for asking it. I was thinking Sarah was going to ask about tech or digital volunteering, which I also think is a huge opportunity that, where possible, helps to build capacity in individuals and organizations. So I think one of the things, as I was listening to your question, what came out or stood out to me was the importance of storytelling.

So, how might you facilitate your volunteers sharing, and how might you encourage storytelling across volunteers and across the organization, such that the stories of the volunteers who are doing that remote volunteering can be integrated together to create an overall sense of belonging for not only how the individuals have a sense of connection in relation to one another, but how they also belong to a broader mandate or vision or possibility?

And so this notion of storytelling, and really leaning into the difference that the volunteers are making, and highlighting those stories at every way and in every place you can, at board tables, and at senior leadership tables, and  with funders, and talking about the difference that volunteers make in when they’re driving, and all of those things, I think, helps build resonance for the individual, but also the organization.

I think those are some examples.

I would also say that part of our challenge is we’re really losing our capacity to lean into in-person opportunities in all sorts of ways, and, you know, it sounds to me like Sarah’s created some flexible opportunities to engage people as remote drivers in a whole bunch of different ways with young people. I think that sounds really great.

Think about maybe opportunities to bring people together to do some shared storytelling, and then how to use those stories to leverage out to different impact opportunities across the organization.

Elizabeth McIsaac: One of the issues that many organizations struggle with is capacity. In some way, engaging volunteerism strengthens, as you rightly framed it, it’s about creating community, it’s about strengthening democracy, it’s that connective tissue, it’s all of those other things, but there’s also just a real capacity of the organization itself to get some stuff done.

But when you don’t have that capacity to organize and lead for it, what are ways of building that, maybe incrementally, or how do you begin that project or pathway to that?

Megan Conway: To build capacity to be able to have a stronger volunteer program?

Elizabeth McIsaac: Yep.

Megan Conway: Yeah, I think that’s a great question. We have some resources at Volunteer Canada. We have individuals who could help provide some insight, knowledge, tools, and expertise. Volunteer managers are great people. And volunteer centres, if you have one in your community. Reach out to those folks.

I would also say, do the hard work of costing out what the impact is that volunteers are having, not just on the financial impact, but across the organization, how they’re laddering into impacts.

Work with funders that are interested in building that capacity. I think it’s increasingly challenging when we think about capacity building and how to find resources for it, but there are funders and partners out there that will invest in that capacity work. I think it does cost to actually do that.

I think it’s important for us to value that work, and increasingly, I am really putting a stake in the ground that volunteering is not free, and that we have to build the infrastructure around it.

So get really creative around how you are going to cost out what the impact is your program makes, or your volunteer engagement initiative makes, and where you might have, corporate, charitable, or philanthropic, or government funders that might be interested in investing in that.

And think creatively around the participants in that volunteer work, as to how you might weave that together into different kinds of outcomes that achieve different kinds of objectives and lead into different outcomes, whether it’s for seniors or young people or others, where there’s a service opportunity there that can be invested in a different way.

And don’t undervalue. I think my big observation is that we undervalue the work we do, whether you’re a volunteer engagement professional, whether you’re a leader of volunteers, whether you’re the person who holds the hat of recruiting and retaining volunteers.

We have got to stop doing this work at no cost, because at the end of the day, it needs to be valued and visible, and needs to not be so fragmented.

It’s a bit of a call to action. We have to collectively put a stake in the ground around what this means to our communities, to our organizations, and to the country.

Elizabeth McIsaac: Very well said. We might have time for one last question. There are some people asking questions around, does it make a difference where you are? Is it easier to build volunteerism in a big city, like Toronto or Vancouver, or is it a small town, and are the strategies going to be different, and how do you build that momentum?

Megan Conway: Really great question. I would just argue that I think the sites where we learned about volunteerism and participation have disappeared across the country. Service clubs are closing, churches and mosques and other faith-based institutions are on the decline. Those places exist across Canada, and to that end, I think we are at a creative crisis, because people are no longer learning about how to volunteer and participate from those old sites, and that crosscuts Canada. It doesn’t matter if it’s urban or rural. I would say some of the impacts are bigger, depending on where you live, and depending on what the nature of the civic infrastructure looks like.

But I would say that that’s definitely a whole-of-Canada thing that’s going on. It doesn’t matter if you’re rural or you’re urban. We’re all experiencing challenges around volunteering and participation because there have been sizable, noticeable closures of sites of civic infrastructure, and we haven’t figured out how to replace them, or how we’re going to do that collectively. So, it doesn’t matter where you live.

I would say one thing to think about is that sometimes in rural communities, people have a different network that they’re utilizing, which can be both good and bad, because it may not create welcome in the ways that need to be generated.

But, you know, I think the problems are different depending on where you live, and it depends on context. Find a volunteer centre in your community, and if there isn’t one, work with your municipality to create infrastructure to build one.

Elizabeth McIsaac: Right.

And so, Megan, any final words? You’re leading the charge in Canada. You have reframed the question of volunteering. I love how you spoke about it today. There were so many important shifts in how to think about it, in how to be intentional, to see it as systemic, to see it as infrastructure. What are your final words to all of us? And there’s a big group online.

What do we need to do?

Megan Conway: I think we need to work collectively, and we need to mobilize from the local to the national to build infrastructure at scale. We need to talk about this in all sorts of ways to our MPs, to our MPPs, to our elected officials.

And we need to find ways to collectively advocate for an investment at scale that’s going to build the infrastructure that we need.

Not just for today, but for the next 20 years: because we’re well overdue. And so, you know, reach out to volunteercanada.ca, and we would love to have a conversation and lean into ways we can partner with you and to advance this more broadly at scale.

Thank you so much, Elizabeth, for having me on.

Elizabeth McIsaac: Thank you so much. I think it’s a critically important conversation. We are all bemoaning the state of democracy. We’re concerned about the quality and safety of communities, and I can’t think of a better response to that than what you’ve described here today.

So thank you so much, Megan, for taking the time.