Volunteers
Volunteers play an essential role in delivering senior nutrition services — without them, many local service providers would not be able to provide support to older adults effectively. Learning to recruit, engage, and maintain strong relationships with volunteers will help your program thrive.
Quick Guides
- Recipe for Success: Volunteers (YouTube)— Bite-sized video with tips on recruiting, engaging, and retaining
- Tips for Working With Students — Tips from the Center Excellence in Public
Health and the Center for Excellence in Aging Health at the University of New England - Project HELLO — A multiphase effort to engage older adults in Rhode Island by utilizing volunteers
- What Works: Tailored Meals and Volunteers, A New Jersey Meals on Wheels Shares Its Secrets — An Interview with Meals on Wheels of Mercer County
- Volunteer Utilization — Tips on nontraditional roles for volunteers
Guides
- Successful Strategies for Recruiting, Training, and Utilizing Volunteers— SAMHSA handbook
- Enhancing Socialization Through Meaningful Volunteer Connections — How volunteers can
provide socialization for older adults - Tips for Recruiting and Working With Volunteers — Create and maintain strong relationships
- Volunteer Engagement and Recruitment — Resource list
- Project Ideas for Volunteer Dietetic Interns, Nutrition Students, and Professionals— Activity suggestions that benefit both the nutrition program and the volunteer
Presentations
- Thinking Outside the Box Video Series — ACL video series on volunteers in the aging services network
- Fireside Chat With the New York City Department for the Aging (YouTube)— Thirty-minute video
- Fireside Chat With SDSU Cooperative Extension (YouTube)— Thirty-minute video
- Innovative Volunteer Models To Promote Social Connection— One-hour Commit to Connect webinar featuring the Give 5 program, SAGE, and the Christopher and Dana Reeve Foundation, with accompanying Innovative Volunteer Models To Promote Social Connection (Slides)
- Senior Center Round Table – Celebrating Volunteers!— One-hour NCOA event to share perspectives on volunteerism in senior centers (free registration required to view the video)
Reports
- Volunteerism Study — ACL's Office of Performance and Evaluation final report
- Economic Value of Volunteers — Key results
- Effective Volunteer Practices — Examples
- Study Briefing— Fifty-minute video presentation
- Volunteer Stories Brief — Insights
Tools and Toolkits
- Effective Elements Library— Community Care Corps collection of approaches that will enable organizations to create impactful volunteer-based models
- Tips for Recruiting and Supporting Volunteers as Evidence-Based Program Leaders— NCOA article on successfully working with volunteers
- Give 5 Program— Initiative connecting retired or nearly retired older adults with nonprofit organizations