Tuesday, October 22, 2013

Volunteers are key to a charity’s success.

Charities big and small rely on volunteers. At London Health Sciences Foundation, volunteers are the lifeblood of our organization.

For smaller charities, especially those starting out, volunteers are essential. For a small organization that needs to keep start-up costs down in order to grow successfully, volunteers can provide skill, knowledge and experience, a determined and passionate workforce, and act as a link into their community in order to raise awareness for the charity and its cause or beneficiary.

For larger or more mature charities that maintain an employee workforce to meet the daily demand and workload, volunteers remain equally as valuable. At our Foundation, they assist staff in increasing our efficiency, our effectiveness, and our overall success; and they are an indispensable link to the community as ambassadors and advocates for London Health Sciences Centre and its many programs.

According to an Imagine Canada Research Note on the 2010 Canada Survey of Giving conducted by Statistics Canada, more than 13.3 million Canadians volunteered about 2.1 billion hours of their time annually to charitable and volunteer organizations. That’s the equivalent of 1.1 million fulltime jobs. We know that LHSF and LHSC volunteers give thousands of hours of their time each and every year.

We work hard to attract, and even actively recruit, volunteers to our Foundation, but it is often our volunteers who are our most effective recruiters as they speak to their family, friends, neighbours and personal and business acquaintances about our organization and our hospital

Volunteers also tend to lead by example when it comes to giving with 91% of volunteers making charitable donations, compared to 73% of non-volunteers.

Our volunteers bring fresh ideas, insight and expertise that supplement and complement the knowledge and dedicated effort of our employees. The volunteers on our board and committees act as the community’s conscience, providing important guidance and oversight to our Foundation’s operations.

For our Foundation, volunteers bring passion and commitment to literally dozens of health care and patient care causes. They organize and hold about 100 community events each year and are key components in the Foundation’s signature events and other fundraising efforts. They help raise awareness and vital funds that keep our Hospital on the forward edge of medical research, education, innovation and patient care.

Quite simply, we couldn’t do it without them.

Dan Ross

For more on recruiting and managing volunteers who make a difference in your organization, visit Imagine Canada’s sector source pages. Imagine Canada’s Volunteer Value Calculator can assist you in measuring the economic contribution of volunteers. And be sure to check out the helpful resources available at Volunteer Canada too.