Join Kristin Medlin, TreeTop Common’s Director of Research, and Stacey Muse, Executive Director of Volunteer Nevada, at the Corporation for National and Community Service’s 2019 Research Summit. Together they will present a conference session focused on re-conceptualizing the impact of volunteerism.

This session challenges the current narrative of prioritizing the measurement of volunteer impact by the quantification of hours served. This approach overlooks the quality of the volunteer service in favor of an easy-to-calculate dollar output that we argue demonstrates nothing relating to actual effort or effect on the individual volunteer, organization facilitating the service, or the community/population served. Even worse, such calculations fail to recognize that the service may have been harmful in some way.

So, if simply “serving” does not equal success, what does? We suggest that in order to more effectively evaluate volunteer experiences, measures of quality must be developed. This roundtable seeks to foster discussion of potential measures of quantity, quality, and impact, and to explore potential theories, frameworks, and methodologies to bring about that change.

Send us an email to connect with Kristin and Stacey at the conference in Washington DC.