“Life’s most persistent and urgent question is, ‘What are you doing for others?’” — Martin Luther King, Jr.
Hi readers,
What did you do on the evening of Thursday, 3 September? At FSI, we had a great evening kicking off this year’s Community Connections Program with our first “Connection Session”, where participating Social Impact Partners met Corporate Participants in virtual Breakout Sessions to explore potential collaboration opportunities.
Skills-based Volunteering Needed Now More than Ever
Founded in 2015 to connect corporate employees with social impact organizations that seek directors, committee members, and skills-based volunteers, Community Connections has since paired up almost 200 corporate employees with about 100 social impact organizations. In fact, it was through Community Connections that FSI found our current board members.
Early this year, we took over the Community Connections Program, with the aim to enrich the offerings for our Social Impact Partners, including training and resources on board creation, governance, financial and legal literacy. And then COVID happened, and programs such as Community Connections are needed more than ever.
The reason is that social businesses tend to underspend their operating budget on capacity building and human resources, and they rely on volunteers for much of their program implementation and service delivery. Why? Largely due to restricted grantmaking, and the vicious cycle created and perpetuated by funders’ unrealistic expectations of what it costs to run a social impact organization. The result is that organizations are under constant pressure to underspend on what is crucial to their organizational health — its people.
For context, even before COVID-19, 58% of nonprofits in the United States allocated 2% or less of their annual operating budget to support key functions, including program operations, public relations, human resources, financial management, marketing, or technology. As social impact organizations struggle to meet higher-than-ever demand for their services with scant financial and human resources, skills-based volunteering can be a shared-impact solution that channels corporate philanthropic resources into the creation of social impact.
What is Skills-based Volunteering?
With the aim to connect corporate employees with social impact organizations in need of management talents or technical skills, skills-based volunteering can refer to one-off skilled days of service, or a longer-term commitment to scoped projects such as developing operational and fundraising strategies, creating impact measurement tools, or serving on the organization’s board.
There is a general misconception that skills-based volunteering is the same as pro bono services. Here is an explanation offered by Danielle Holly, CEO of Common Impact, and Christine Letts, previous Rita E. Hauser Senior Lecturer in the Practice of Philanthropy and Nonprofit Leadership at Harvard Kennedy School: “…with pro bono, the company’s employees generally make little or no effort to work with the nonprofit’s employees in a way that helps them learn new skills and knowledge”, whereas longer-term skills-based volunteering “knits together the expertise and resources from the corporate and nonprofit sectors to create strengthened sustainable solutions that don’t come undone when partners part ways”.
Stay tuned to Part II of this newsletter to learn about the benefits of skills-based volunteering!
Starting from 19 September to 27 September, HandsOn Hong Kong will be running its fourth annual Serve-a-thon, a nine-day event where people in Hong Kong can volunteer virtually or in-person to support the social impact organizations that continue to serve the under-served. Check out their calendar and register for volunteer activities whether as an individual, a group, or a corporation.
