Fostering a Culture of Volunteerism
The goal of the Service Enterprise Initiative is to strengthen the capacity of organizations to strategically and effectively engage volunteers to address community needs.
A Service Enterprise is an organization that doesn’t just engage volunteers, but operates with a culture of volunteerism that enables it to fundamentally leverage volunteers and their skills to achieve its social mission. These high-performing organizations have deeply integrated volunteers into their strategic plan and day-to-day operations, thereby allowing them to reduce costs and increase efficiency and effectiveness in providing services to fulfill their mission.
A Service Enterprise Hub leads cohort(s) of organizations through a prescribed training and coaching process to build their capacity to operate in this way.
Ultimately, becoming a Service Enterprise organization will give you the ability to look at internal staff capacity in a new way and leverage skilled volunteers to expand that capacity to achieve your mission. A nationally certified Service Enterprise organization typically benefits from:
- Outperforming similar organizations on all measures of organizational capacity
- Increased human resource capacity with limited additional expense
- Significant increase in volunteer hours contributed annually
- Retooled operations that intentionally use skilled volunteers
- Community needs better addressed through organizational growth
- Ability to take programs to scale
- VCSJ and Service Enterprise Trainers help organizations realize these benefits through assessment, training, and coaching.