Episode 222 – Volunteer Leadership Stories with Catherine Huckaby  

Tobi Johnson: Welcome to the Volunteer Nation podcast, bringing you practical tips and big ideas on how to build, grow, and scale volunteer talent. I’m your host, Tobi Johnson. And if you rely on volunteers to fuel your charity cause, membership, or movement, I made this podcast just for you.

Welcome everybody to another episode of the Volunteer Nation podcast. I’m your host, Tobi Johnson, and I’m on the road today. I had to leave my house because we’re packing up, getting ready to move. And I really wanted to have this conversation today. So I decamped, went to my husband’s office building, and we’re not even sure if this is going to work well. So I’m hoping it does. Let’s hope the quality is good. If it’s a little bit not as good as usual, I hope you’ll just give us a little grace there.

But I really wanted to have this conversation about volunteer leadership stories. It’s with Catherine Huckaby, who has just written a book called Nobody Starts Ready: How Ordinary People Make a Real Difference Where They Live. I’m going to introduce Catherine in a minute, but I just want to say welcome to Catherine.

We’ve been talking about leadership here and there on the pod. If you’ll recall, I had my friend Jenny Field on for episode 160 and 161 on leadership principles for sparking change. So check those out. I’ll post those links in the show notes. But it’s been a really interesting time to think about volunteer leadership. We found in our Volunteer Management Progress Report, and I’ll link to that as well in the show notes, that many organizations are not yet leveraging the full power of volunteer leadership. At least half of nonprofits, or nearly half of nonprofits that we surveyed, only really leveraged volunteers less than five percent of their workforce as volunteer leaders.

So I really want to talk about leadership. I want to talk about how people are getting involved. I want to hear those volunteer leadership stories from Catherine. And as you all know, if you are a listener who’s been with me for a while, I’ve been working on a book for volunteers who lead forever and a day. But guess what? I’m actually making plans to clear my schedule this summer. We are going to take a hiatus on the pod. Now we’re not taking that hiatus right away. We still have many episodes scheduled. I’ll let you know when that episode comes. But we have another month of content still. I am going to take a short summer hiatus to just focus entirely on this book because it needs to be written. So stay tuned for that. I’m looking forward to sharing our progress as I go.

But let’s get down to what we’re up to today: volunteer leadership stories with Catherine Huckaby. Now, Catherine Huckaby is executive director of Community Positive and, as I said, she’s the author of Nobody Starts Ready: How Ordinary People Make a Real Difference Where They Live. She spent more than two decades leading communications and community engagement programs. So she’s talking your talk, y’all. Her focus was building the systems that connect neighbors with their local government and designing them so participation works for everyone, not just the insiders who already know how things run. I’ve been saying this for a while, right? We need to make sure we bring that community into our organizations because they actually have valuable insights that we don’t know about.

She later moved on to an executive role with a public safety oversight agency where she saw community from the inside of public policy and accountability. Through the Community Positive Project, she has interviewed hundreds of volunteers, public servants, and elected officials across the US and Canada about what actually works in building engaged communities. Those conversations became the foundation for her book. She writes and speaks about volunteer engagement, community trust, and how people get started in civic life without burning out. This is good, y’all.

She also holds a BA in political science and history and an MPA. She is a trained family mediator. She lives in Texas with her family. Welcome, Catherine. This is great. I think the special emphasis for some of you who are listening, you’re either working in private charities, you’re working in grassroots organizing, or you’re working in a public sector organization, whether it be federal, state, or local, that is involving the community. I think this conversation will apply to all.

Catherine Huckaby : Thank you for having me.

Tobi: So let’s get started. I always like to kick off, Catherine, with how people sort of got into what they do. In particular, tell us how you got into the world of community engagement. What’s your birth story?

Catherine: My birth story is that I was not raised in a family that volunteered. Like most people that I meet, their family was going to work, paying bills, raising the kids, and just living life. The concept of actually going and volunteering in the community, serving in some capacity, was just not something that I saw until I got married and had my first child, and we were in church. Someone said, “You know what? I think you would be great doing this.” I just remember being so hesitant and young. I was 20 years old and I thought, “No one needs me to do any of these things and I’m not qualified.”

That really kind of started a snowball effect into where I started raising my hand and offering up different ideas and suggestions about how to do different things into my local PTA. I ended up being one of those lovely PTA presidents that everyone talks about. All of those different situations really led me to go back to school. I earned my degree, and during all of that I was taking lots of classes on mediation. At this time, which was a few years ago, there was not really a term for community engagement, and volunteerism was not thought of the way that it is now, and it definitely wasn’t exemplified as something that was necessarily a positive thing.

As I started working through different positions, ending up in a smaller city, creating their volunteer program from kind of the ground up, I really saw people at their best who were much more qualified, educated, small business owners who were coming to the city saying, “How can I help the police department? How can I help the fire department?” They had all these skills and resources. They were not there to shred paper and they were not there to just answer the phones. They had valuable things that they could then bring to the table. That really helped me to start to create programs that were more focused on leveraging the tools and the resources that they had and cost-saving measures for organizations instead of always relying on a staff member to be able to provide those things.

Really from there I moved into a larger city where I led community engagement for all of the neighborhoods and area agencies that were there. I think the thing about community engagement and civic engagement when you’re looking at municipalities that sometimes people forget is that the people you are really going to be engaging with are the local volunteers because they’re the ones that have the time to come to the board and commission meetings or serve on those boards, to come to the city council meetings, to come to a park and rec event or to a public meeting. You really want to be able to talk the talk of a volunteer and not be over their head, not make them feel like they’re not qualified. Because again, a lot of times they are more educated, more equipped with things than you are. Treating them like the subject matter experts that many of them are has been a real game changer for me.

Tobi: Yeah, yeah. Why do you think volunteerism is important in today’s world in particular?

Catherine: I think that COVID taught me and a lot of people why volunteerism is so important. I think there was a complete shift and change, and once we all had to do things virtually or completely were cut off and we didn’t even have that as an option, I think that people started to realize: I miss seeing somebody’s face. I miss giving somebody a hug. I miss understanding what the context of something is that they’re going through. I miss just being able to have the luxury of going to church or going into work and having coffee with someone.

For me, volunteerism is key to communities getting back into that in a comfortable way. There are still a lot of people that are working remotely or hybrid positions, and they have not gotten engaged in their communities. They don’t feel like they’re a part of their neighborhoods and of their extended neighbors. They don’t know their next door neighbors. Even the term community is different now than what it used to be. Our community now could be two people that we’re online with. It’s not necessarily the neighborhood and the people that you would go across the street for to pick up a package.

I think getting people engaged in something they genuinely care about and not something they’re told to do, but that they really care about, they’re invested in that. That is the way to get them more engaged overall in the community. Volunteering is just that one little aspect of that.

I think the other piece of that is financially, and COVID brought that to light as well. I think most organizations, especially nonprofits, and a lot of our cities as well, are struggling financially to try to get the sponsorships and the philanthropists to continue to offer up funding in the way that they used to. I think the more that we can leverage the existing talent that’s out there for people who are willing to volunteer, I think that is really being the best stewards that we can of all the funding that we have.

Tobi: Yeah, absolutely. So I heard two things. One is around just volunteerism as a place to plug into community and get connected for folks who may feel like they’re not yet connected. The other is just the sustainability of purpose-driven organizations, whether they be public sector or private charities. I think also for funders, it shows them when there’s a tremendous amount of volunteer engagement, it shows that that cause is important to that community. In addition to the in-kind contributions you might put in your grant proposal, the fact that this many people want to support this cause shows a funder that it is a deeply loved cause and could do more, even more, with additional funding. It’s not about replacing staff per se.

Let’s shift gears and talk about your book.

Catherine: Mm-hmm.

Tobi: Nobody Starts Ready. What inspired you to write it and what did you learn in the process? As a fellow author, I’m at my editing stage. I’ve got 11 chapters, I’ve got everything figured out, I’ve been through developmental edits, and now I’m re-editing the chapters. I’m really pumped. But it’s a marathon to write a book. So what sparked you and what did you learn in the process?

Catherine: So I think that the main thing was whenever I created Community Positive, which is just an online free resource where I went out and did interviews across the United States of public servants and volunteers to hear their “why.” Why and what is your motivating factor, and what do people need to know about the value of volunteering, about the value of serving in local government? As I kept doing that, there were just certain themes that kept coming over and I was very surprised at some of the things that I kept hearing that were very similar, whether it was a city manager or someone who was a Sunday school teacher. But the big thing that I kept hearing was people never felt like they were qualified, that they had the right background, that maybe they would even be welcome, maybe they had a bad experience previously. It wasn’t that they didn’t care about their community or a specific organization, but for whatever reason they were saying, “I’ll wait until the kids are grown up. I’ll wait until I’m retired. I’ll wait until this job or I have more knowledge or I feel better or I know the right person.” All of these things.

As I was interviewing these people, they just said, “At some point we just had to do it.” But it was usually because someone said, “Hey, I see that you are really good at this and it would be great if you would help with this.” Instead of thinking that everyone’s going to raise their hand when I say, “I need volunteers” or I put out a public press release and say, “Hey, we need this,” it’s investing the time in people that you see and that you come across to say, “I think you could do this. I think that you would bring real value to this.” Those are the stories that I kept hearing, and how they met these people, how they came across their paths, and what led those different steps to where they were now.

Every single time that I talked to someone and I would say, “What was the one person or the one moment that you can go back to to say this thing happened, or I met this person, and at this moment I knew? I didn’t know what I wanted to be when I grew up, didn’t know what the job was going to be, but I knew that in some way, shape, or form I was going to be serving.” When I asked them, they every single one just stopped, had to think for a few minutes, and then they would start telling me these stories. Every single time I would say, “Does that person know that because of them, you are the city manager of the fifth largest city? Does this person know that because of this, you’re teaching fifth graders now?” Most of the time they didn’t. A lot of times it was family members, but it wasn’t always. It really did make me think, especially with our families. It was my mom, it was my dad, it was my grandfather, but they’ve never really had that conversation of, “But did you really know what an impact that made?”

That was really one of the catalysts for the book: there are all these stories out there that people are not aware of. They’re small. Some people may think they’re insignificant. Someone took the time to really cast a vision for someone or encourage someone to be a part of something, or to not ignore the person that’s always complaining about everything because you don’t want to know what the root cause of that really was. Involving all of those people, if they knew those stories, they can see themselves in that and then they can figure out, “Should I maybe get involved in volunteering? Maybe I do need to be a public servant. Is this my calling or do I just need to know the name of my neighbor next door?”

Tobi: Yeah, yeah, absolutely. It’s so interesting because this is an aspect of volunteerism that is not really talked about that often and is not factored into our sector’s strategies for attracting volunteers. What I mean by that is there’s a lot of talk about, “We need to talk about the impact of volunteering to the community. And if we’re able to quantify that better, then more people will volunteer.” Maybe people who’ve already decided to volunteer and they’re selecting between organizations, or there’s an event that’s happening like a natural disaster that sparks and they’re like, “Okay, yeah, this impact’s going to be immediate.”

We also think about when we think about attracting volunteers to our organizations, we think about communications audits, messaging, onboarding, application processes, how to make these a lot more streamlined, how to really welcome people in the right way.

Catherine Huckaby: Yes. We make it complicated.

Tobi: Yeah, we make it way too complicated.

But this aspect of why people get involved, we also understand through research on volunteer motivations. But the spark at the impetus of “I’ve decided, yes, I do want to make a difference in some way,” at that nexus, that kind of spark, it’s someone who talked to us about our capabilities and reassured us that we had capacity and we had something to offer.

I talk about lack of confidence a lot in my training, and I say that’s one of the number one reasons people don’t volunteer: they don’t have confidence. They don’t think because you use all your jargon in your organization, and they’re like, “I don’t know what all these acronyms mean.” People think even leaders, I’ve worked with and volunteered with leaders who come from like they have a PhD, they ran teams, and all of a sudden they’re leading a volunteer group and they’re being very self-conscious. I’m like, “What are you talking about? You have a lifetime of work experience. Just because you’re retired doesn’t mean it went out the window. Have you led meetings before at work? Similar concepts apply.”

So I love this idea of exploring when that spark, when that notion came into being. You talk about the myth in the book that leaders are “born ready,” that we come out of the womb and we’re either a leader or not. Either you got it or you don’t. I can guarantee you that that’s not the case because when I started leading, I was awful at leading. I made so many mistakes.

How did you discover through your conversations that confidence often follows action rather than precedes leadership? People were telling you their stories about their lack of confidence. Was there anything else you learned in these conversations about why people are delaying getting involved or what fears are holding people back?

Catherine: Well, first of all it was a pattern. Every single person that I interviewed, like the first hundred, were people that I had direct relationships with. So I’m calling them because I know them for this very specific thing. I worked with them with this project or with this organization. When I’m asking them about their favorite stories and their whys and how did you start to do this, I’m assuming they’re going to answer in a certain way. Never. They didn’t ever talk about the things that I thought they were going to. But the pattern of “I did not have that confidence” really confused me because these are professionals in whatever organization that they are, and for them to be saying that they just suddenly decided or someone encouraged them to show up to do it, and that by continuing to do it, trying out other opportunities, that is what actually was the byproduct and gave them that confidence.

The things that we challenge that we’re so challenged with now, 20 years ago everything was not on the internet. People didn’t see everything that you possibly ever thought, said, or anything. We weren’t on our phones like we are now. If there was a challenge or a problem with an organization or locally, you didn’t know about it unless someone told you about it. Now we seem to know everything about everyone and every challenge that’s out there. What I kept hearing were the people that said, “You know, sometimes people just want to talk about everything. They want to debate it out. They look on their phone for an hour and they’re doom scrolling and they’re assuming that that’s actually doing something. It’s doing nothing.” But they don’t have the tools to understand that if they just stepped outside their front door, went somewhere within their sphere, their community, and said, “Hey, I want to help out. What can I do? What are the needs that you have?” People would be just ecstatic because that does not happen, especially in local government. There are so many boards and commissions and working groups and different things that are happening. People show up to complain at a city council meeting, but what they’re not doing is going up to a city council member and saying, “Hey, my name is Catherine. I just wanted to introduce myself to you.” That’s it. They don’t do that and start that relationship.

At least they have a bug in their ear that I am a person that exists in their sphere of influence. They’re going to see me somewhere else, and then maybe I’m going to be that person that they think of for something. When there is a challenge in my neighborhood, I’m upset about a zoning issue or I’m concerned about whatever thing is being built, she knows who I am by face, and she’s going to see me as a friendly. It’s not just coming to complain, but “How can we work on this together?” I feel like the more that we start looking into that and helping people to be able to build that confidence, that is a thing that just kept coming out over and over. It’s all about equipping people to feel like they can do it.

Tobi: Yeah. What it’s bringing to mind to me in terms of strategy, if I’m thinking, “Okay, yeah, we know volunteering is nice. Okay, now we’re understanding that one of the main barriers to volunteers, even starting the idea of volunteering at that early way upstream from checking websites or going on Idealist and looking for opportunity, or going on your local city or county website and looking for volunteer opportunities, before that even happens, there’s a nascent period, a period of potential, people making that aha moment happen. The aha moment, if I was thinking strategically, I would think to myself as a communicator, my messaging needs to be about what does it take to volunteer at minimum? What do you need to have?” I often advise people: lower the bar and put it in your messaging. “All it takes is a smile and a friendly disposition to be a greeter at our hospital.” It’s all it takes is a smile. You have a smile, right?

It also doubles down on the idea that storytelling and telling those stories, not so that people necessarily see the story in the way the organization sees the story. The organization is listening to the story or telling the story and thinking about the impact. The potential community member who’s on that little nexus of the aha moment, they’re listening to the story, they’re saying, “If they could do it, I could do it.” It’s a completely different relationship to the story.

Catherine: Yeah.

Tobi: When we say storytelling writ large in the nonprofit sector, we’re often thinking stories of impact, but it’s also about the volunteer’s experience. So it’s almost like you want to share testimonials of volunteers’ emotions around volunteering.

Catherine: Exactly. And the impact that it had on them. I think that’s the biggest point. I interviewed someone who said that as a youth they had volunteered at a local camp. As the year went through, they escalated her role and now she’s over some of the volunteers that are there, but she’s still like 18 years old. She’s an attorney now for a city. What she told me was during that experience when she was dealing with kids and she would see them coming in from foster care, they were supposed to be there for that week. They had shoes that didn’t have the soles. They had clothing that did not fit them. She saw things like that. That impacted her to say, “I don’t know what I’m going to do when I grow up, but I know that it’s going to be serving people in some way.” Now she’s with affordable housing. That’s what she works with as an attorney because she saw that people had a need that she never experienced in her own life.

We say sometimes privileged, and we are all privileged to some degree no matter how low that we started. There’s always someone that might need a little bit more. Sometimes it takes us getting outside of our own little bubble to be able to see that. When we’re telling those stories about these volunteers, yes, it’s the impact on the organization, and of course we’re going to look at data and end of the year reports, but what has the relationship that we’ve built with this volunteer done to change their life?

Tobi: Right. So when you’re advising or talking to volunteers and these newer leaders, how do you coach them to full potential? You talk about imperfect first steps. How do you get people once they say, “Aha, maybe I could do this?” We want to move people from “aha, maybe I could do this” to “aha, yes I can do this,” and then “yes, I can do this and actually I can do more than I ever thought.” That’s moving to the next leadership level. What are you doing to coach people along that? What advice are you giving folks?

Catherine: Well, I think that as volunteer leaders, whether you are a volunteer in that role or if you are paid, I think our expectations have to be a little bit different than maybe what they used to be. Especially as we take classes and we become certified and we have all these things, we forget sometimes that the person that is coming in to volunteer, they don’t know acronyms, they don’t know the terminology, they don’t understand that everything that they’re doing might be dissected by a supervisor somewhere else. They don’t understand that we’re looking at how to quantify the hourly rate of a volunteer. They don’t care about any of those things. What they care about is, “Am I being valued whenever I walk in the door? Or is this just a waste of my time?”

What I talk to leaders about is change the way that you’re putting your energy into relating with people. It’s not about the end result, it’s not necessarily even about orientation training and background checks and all the forms and all of those things. It’s about how are you going to get them started? What is that initial time that you are spending with them? Whether that is online, what does your website look like? That first page, is that a welcoming opportunity to people? Does it scream to you, “I can make a difference here?” Or is it just numbers and data and this is the list of all the volunteer opportunities and here’s the qualifications and you must be available for this, this, and this. I’m not even going to look at that.

This happens very often, but if someone actually comes to your organization in person and says, “Hey, I would love to help out. What kind of opportunities do you have?” Who is that first person that’s going to be making that impression on them? Do they know what a volunteer is? Do they know what we’re really looking for? For example, city governments, a lot of times people will come to city government, they’ll randomly be maybe at a city council meeting and they’re signing in and they’re going to be doing the comment cards. The person sitting at that desk probably does not know the answer to this question, but if they say, “Hey, if I wanted to get more involved and I wanted to serve on this commission, what would I need to do?” It’s our job as leaders to make sure that anyone that is coming in contact with the public that is a representative of our organization, that they are our ambassadors that are telling them that they’re looking for people intuitively.

“I see that you’ve been coming here. You come to all the meetings. Have you thought about doing this? I saw the way that you guys did this together. I appreciate that you did this. Have you thought about…?”

Making sure that the ambassador thing is such a big thing to me for our organizations. The more we tell everyone internally the “why” that we need volunteers and that it’s not a number, that it’s not a quota, that it’s not a cost savings, but this is the real “why” through the storytelling, showing the impact and not just putting it out there for the external audience. When we can do that, then you’re going to have the ambassadors that are going to drive people to want to be a part of your organization. I think that is one of the biggest challenges across the board in organizations I see: cities, nonprofits, churches. They’re not thinking about the existing staff as their ambassadors that need to know really what a volunteer is, what that process looks like, how hard is it, what are the true needs. Unfortunately, I love volunteerism, but unfortunately that word is not always seen as a positive thing internally. Sometimes people think, “That means I gotta train somebody. This is going to be more work. I have to watch them, I have to do this, whatever.”

If those are the people that might be temporarily in charge of someone who would be doing something, they don’t need to be there. That is not the right role for them. Picking those ambassadors and making as many people as you can possible, that is really one of the keys to getting people, especially with the younger generation. They really want to help, they want to make a difference, they want to make an impact, but it takes about one time of someone acting like what they’re doing doesn’t matter and they will never come back.

Tobi: Yeah, and not just to that organization, often not to volunteer at all. Because they’re like, “Volunteerism isn’t for me, obviously.”

It also makes me think about ambassadors. We do a lot of training on ambassadorship around training your coworkers, but more training your volunteers. I love that you called out your coworkers as well. Everyone in your organization should be able to represent your organization across all the opportunities, whether it’s financial contributions, volunteers, etc.

I remember a volunteer, I was talking with one of our volunteers when I worked at a state agency, and we were out doing Medicare education for Medicare and Medicaid out in the community. A certain team had a lot of volunteers on their team. I said, “How do y’all recruit so many people?” And they said, “It’s all word of mouth, and here’s how we do it.” They would be out in the community talking about Medicare enrollment, Medicare Part D, prescription drug benefit, so that beneficiaries could know what their steps were and their options were. Medicare is not an easy government program to navigate. For those of you who aren’t there yet, I’m not there yet, but we’ll soon be. It’s complicated and it really frustrates people. Because they’ve paid money into this their whole life out of their paycheck and they expect to have the service when it’s supposed to happen, but they don’t know, and it’s a pocketbook issue because there’s a variety of options. It’s complicated.

You might have people who are grumpy when they come to these meetings, and not because the volunteers had anything to do with Medicare policy, but they are the spokespeople to educate people. Once people settle down, they start to realize these volunteers are there to help. People will get really interested. Certain people in the audience would start asking a lot more questions. They really leaned into it. They were asking smart questions.

Our volunteers were always in teams. One volunteer’s job was to go over to anyone who was super interested, based on body language or facial expression, and they would say, “It seems like you’re so interested in this topic. Have you ever thought about volunteering? We are always needing people like us to help others in the community.” That’s the primary way they did their recruitment. It was the ambassadorship, and it was not starting with, “Hey, we need somebody to come down and do presentations. We don’t have enough people to do presentations next month. Here’s a clipboard. Could you write down your name?” It was, “Hey, you seem like a person like us who does things like these.”

Catherine: Right. Because you’re passionate about it and they want to be a part of that too then.

Tobi: Yeah. The nuance of it is what people may be missing. They may say, “We do an ambassador program. It doesn’t work.” Well, you’re not approaching it maybe in the right way.

Catherine: I do think that there’s a lot of organizations that I’ve been a part of too, where I could be talking to someone about something, and the term “volunteer” would come up. “Is there an opportunity for that?” And they would actually say, “I didn’t know we had a volunteer program.” I can’t tell you how many times I’ve been a part of something, and I’m like, “How do you not know? We screen this, we tell everyone.” There’s no such thing as talking about it internally too much because there’s always someone that doesn’t know. If that person tells someone else, “No, we don’t have any opportunities like that,” that’s a missed opportunity.

Tobi: Or just, “Let me get you connected with somebody who can talk about the perfect opportunity for you and what you’re interested in, your time availability and all that. Let me get you connected with our volunteer coordinator because I just want to make sure, you know, you have so much passion around this and I think you’d be awesome for us.” It’s that little reassurance and personal invitation that can make all the difference. You have to invite a lot of people to get a lot of people to volunteer.

Catherine: Yeah. If they think it’s a cattle call, you don’t need me.

Tobi: Yeah, forget it. How many times have you been in a meeting where the clipboard gets handed around and it comes back empty? I’ve seen that a million times on my own committees.

Okay, let’s take a quick break and afterwards let’s talk about some volunteer leadership stories. At least one. So let’s take a pause for my conversation with Catherine Huckaby on volunteer leadership stories. We will be right back. And when we get back, we’re going to get some inspiration flowing for y’all if you haven’t felt it already. All right, so don’t go anywhere. We’ll be right back.

Tobi: Okay, y’all, we’re back with a conversation on volunteer leadership stories with Catherine Huckaby. If you were not inspired prior to the break, you will be now because we’re going to talk about real lives change through volunteerism. Catherine, share with us a story of a volunteer that just personally touched you that you thought was pretty amazing. What obstacles did they come up against? How did they overcome them? And what was the ultimate impact of their volunteering on them and the community?

Catherine: So one of my favorites, I love looking at people whenever they were younger and how that impacted them to become volunteers. Karina is one of my favorites. She is in Texas, and when she was 12, she was close enough to her local library so that she could walk to the library. She would go there every afternoon, and someone said something to her about the fact that there was a teen volunteer program. So she decided to sign up. It wasn’t something she went there to do, it wasn’t something that she had planned to do, but someone that worked at the library encouraged her to sign up. She was also one of the only Hispanic teens in the volunteer group. She said that at that time she had felt isolated in her community somewhat, being again one of the only Hispanics. When she joined that group of volunteers, they immediately welcomed her. She felt like she was appreciated and loved.

The only obstacle that she had was just how ordinary it was, and how easy it would have been for her if no one had ever asked her to volunteer. There wasn’t a dramatic moment, there was nothing that screamed, “This is going to be a future leader.” But staff around her noticed her skills, they talked to her, and she continued to volunteer for several years, well into her teens. Additional staff started taking her under their wing. “You know, you should go to college. You should think about maybe a job in local government. Did you know that there’s jobs in volunteerism?” People just kept repeatedly encouraging her and really kind of pouring into her and saying, “Do you see the things that other people don’t see about you?”

Today she’s a volunteer resources manager for a city in Texas, and the programs and the training that she’s been a part of has helped to really make an impact over hundreds of thousands of people. It all started because at 12 she decided just to show up at a library and someone noticed that she kept coming back day after day. So what can we do to encourage her?

Tobi: I think I might know this Karina. I’m like, this is Karina Sadler. She’s one of our guest advisors inside the Impact Lab. She has not only become a volunteer coordinator, she now has global impact through the Impact Lab as a trainer. My goodness. When I was hearing your story, I’m like, “I think I know this volunteer.”

Catherine: You do, I bet. Yes. Did you know that about her?

Tobi: That’s so awesome. So you too as a volunteer can have a global reach. That’s fantastic. We love her at Volunteer Pro. Tell us another story of another volunteer. We love hearing these volunteer leadership stories.

Catherine: So there is another Tobi. Every time I look at your last name, I’m thinking it’s a different Tobi. She spells it with an I too. She was — today Tobi’s an executive director and a former board trustee in Fort Worth. But long before any of that started, she was in fifth grade and she decided that she really wanted to clean up her neighborhood. It was Earth Day. They had just started celebrating those, and she really decided that she wanted to do an aluminum can drive. Her parents were like, “Okay, do whatever you want to do.” She didn’t have a committee, she didn’t have funding, no one gave her permission to do anything. She didn’t go to school and say, “Hey, I want to do this.” She decided she was going to do it herself. She asked all of her friends and said, “We’re going to be here in the woods near my house.”

She was there, waiting on a Saturday, and she started to really think, “Okay, maybe no one’s going to come, and maybe this was stupid, and maybe they’re not going to believe that this is anything important.” She said whenever she got there that she saw about 50 kids that showed up, and her dad was there with her, and he was just shocked that she was able to get that many kids to show up. She says, “I had ADHD and laughing and moving things around and being a part of a lot of activity was probably one of the things that kept her out of trouble as a kid.” But that tiny, unofficial kind of program act really planted a seed for her. From that moment on, she said that it was really a lifetime of community leadership, elected office. She didn’t wait for an adult to tell her that she should organize something. She just decided to do it and figured out a way to bring her friends along.

Tobi: Yeah, amazing. All along the way there are folks creating these sparks. We all have the opportunity to be observant and calling people to their special skills. I really like people to understand that we’re not looking for superheroes. We’re looking for regular folk, and every regular person has a particular quality. It’s almost like you could start this conversation with anyone. Anybody in your life or anybody you see who is willing to lean into something just a little bit or demonstrates an interest in something, there is probably a service opportunity associated with them. We really need to widen our lens when we’re looking at potential in the community and make it part of our everyday.

It’s almost like you’re an ambassador for volunteerism in general. I’m attuned to volunteerism because I’m a volunteer management expert. I see volunteers everywhere. I’ll be in an airport and I’ll be walking by and I’ll say to my husband, “That person’s a volunteer.” I’ll walk up and say, “Hey, are you a volunteer?” And they’re saying, “Yes, I am.” I said, “Well, how long have you been volunteering?” Sometimes I’ll chit-chat a minute and then I’ll say, “Awesome, I love that.” I don’t say anything about what I do and who I am. I just say, “Thank you so much for everything you do.” And just move on. I think we need to get out of looking down into a very insular way of doing volunteer recruitment, to looking out into the world and seeing potential at every turn, regardless of age.

Catherine: And every age too. I love whenever I hear city councils or different city leadership that are saying, “We need to do a youth council. We need to do a youth group that’s going to come in and be a part of this.” These are all volunteers, and these kids have so many good ideas. They’re living in a world that we are not in, that we quite frankly do not understand, even if we have kids that age. They want someone to ask them, “What do you think? What should we do?” They’re going to own these cities and be responsible for them in 15 years. We need to equip them to know how it’s run, what is the process for things, and to start sharing their feedback about how they can make it better.

Tobi: Yeah, as you age, time goes faster. It’s a lot shorter time than you realize that a fifteen-year-old’s going to be a thirty-year-old.

Catherine: And if we don’t train them and mentor them and genuinely care about their opinions, I have been a part of conversations where sometimes I can hear myself saying to one of my children, “Well, that’s not the way that I did it,” or “We did this.” You hear things and then you want to take those words right back immediately because you know how that sounds. This is not the same world it was five years ago. But start looking back 15, 20 years. The kids right now, these are kids that grew up in COVID. They did not have the same experiences of community or even classroom learning. Now they’re going into a world as teenagers and young adults and they’re trying to navigate interpersonal skills that maybe they didn’t learn in the same way. They did not have opportunities to volunteer because everything was shut down. Couldn’t even go to church in some instances. It’s almost like we have to play catch up.

Again, give them permission to mess up, to volunteer somewhere and say, “I don’t want to do that. That was not a good fit. It’s okay. Go find something else.” But they’re so afraid of failing and disappointing or not being good enough. Sometimes we’ve got to get out of our own way enough to really encourage these kids and young adults to mess up like we got to, where it wasn’t always front and center.

Tobi: Do you think there’s a generation gap in terms of the level of grit? For myself and the way I was raised, very working class on my mom’s side, very grit. We were latchkey kids. Everybody was at work. Our parents were at work. We came home, fixed our own snack. We all had chores around the house. I did the family laundry every weekend. We all had real chores. No one drove me to soccer games. I had to figure out who I was going to carpool with. My mom didn’t call around and find me. We see that as a source of pride, but it was also a source of necessity. The skills that we developed, I can organize myself to the nth degree because I did that starting at age 12 or 13 because of necessity. My parents were out of the house working, even on the weekends.

When you think about that value, we tend to put that on other people, young people. “How come they’re not leaning in? How come they’re not getting over it? How come they’re complaining? How come they’re not following through?” You’re pointing out something that people may not realize: it could be, in some cases, that people feel intimidated, or they feel like they might get it wrong, or they feel like they might make a mistake. The reason they may not be showing up, there may be some of that dynamic going on versus “I don’t care about the world and I don’t care about anybody else.” That’s the way that young people are painted. Having worked in youth services a lot of years in my career in nonprofits, I really tried to lean into understanding where people were coming from. But now that I’m out of it, I’m not working with young people every day. I don’t get the bump up, and I don’t have kids, so I don’t have the bump up of my biases being challenged directly in my face. Do you believe that might be what’s going on, this generational gap or misunderstanding?

Catherine: Yeah, and I think it’s our fault. I will take ownership. I really do, for a lot of different reasons. I’ll say it’s all my fault. I do go back to COVID, but I think ten years from now, twenty years from now, we’re going to look back and go, “Look at all the things that happened and that changed as a cascading effect because of that.”

During that time, if you’re looking at the kids that were in elementary school, middle school, high school, everything that they thought they understood in the world of rules and etiquette and what is okay to do, what is safe to do, all of those things were turned upside down and everyone was told to go home. For a lot of people, that home environment was maybe not the best environment. Even school teachers will say kids that are in difficult homes, sometimes going to school is the best place for them to be. We don’t know what was going on. We have no idea what their experiences are. But for us to act like, “Just get over it and move on,” that’s what we do. We move on, right?

Even the conversation now, my son is graduating college and he’s like, “Mom, what am I going to do because of AI?” And I’m like, “Yeah, pivot.” That’s what I think. Because we have the internet and wars and all these things, and you know what you do? You just keep going because you don’t know what’s going to change, because everything changed all the time. But for this generation, think about how scary it is for them at their age to think, “Can I have a family? Am I going to have a job career? What is that even going to look like? Retirement, any of those things?” Because they’ve got parents like us who are maybe getting closer to thinking about retirement, and they’re hearing about all the things that we’re saying. I think that if we don’t stop and say, “I get this, I hear it, and all these things can be true. But now what? How can I help you? How can I equip you?”

Some of the smartest kids that I have met are working in Mansfield, Texas, volunteering on a youth council. If you want to wonder about the youth of today and whether they’ve got it, do they have the grit? Do they have the fire in their belly to be able to do the things that are going to matter for generations to come? Go and talk to them. Go and talk to the kids that are like that. They have more thoughts about how things can be improved. They’re not talking about diversity in the same way that our generation did. They’re talking about it on a scale that goes beyond race or ethnicity. They’re talking about open spaces and they’re talking about how you would really be able to bring someone into local government to be a city manager.

They didn’t go into serving in a youth council because there was a flyer that said, “Come be a part of youth council.” They went to a city event that was a fun event for youth, and different people said, “You should think about going and being a part of university. What’s that? It’s going to tell you about some things in the city.” From there, somebody said, “Hey, you should think about being on the youth council. What’s that?” Multiple people that were a part of that said, “I just did it because I thought I’d put it on the college application.” Then you get in the middle of it and you realize that city council members and city managers are listening to you, that they brought them to the table and said, “We’re looking at a comprehensive plan about what this city should look like in twenty, thirty years. What do you think?”

Is that happening in every city? Maybe not. Yes, it 100% should. They’re going to be running these cities. If someone’s not seeing them, if organizations aren’t giving them the opportunities to be seen, then we’re never going to see all that potential. Someone’s not going to see it if they stay in their house 24/7 and never go anywhere. The adults that are around them need to say, “Hey, let’s go do this. Have you thought about doing this?”

Tobi: This has been a great conversation. As I get to a certain level in my career, I’ve been shifting a lot into more mentorship roles. Having worked with young people in the past and seeing the power of youth, I think given the right circumstances, if you want to learn about how to work with young people, I’m going to put a link to research Youth Adult Partnership. It will tell you everything you need to know. I’ll post a few resources in the show notes. It will teach you how to, if you’re wondering, because nothing happens by design. You don’t just bring a bunch of young people and say, “What do you think?” There’s a lot of design work. You have these stages: this event, then training, then this ask. It’s a cumulative thing. If you really want to empower young people, check out Youth Adult Partnership.

After hearing so many volunteer leadership stories, Catherine, you have talked to hundreds of volunteers about their experience and their life cycle as a volunteer and into service, into government, into nonprofits, into other types of careers. What do you believe is the number one thing that organizations can do right now to get this moving in the right direction if they feel like they’re not connected enough, or they feel like they’re not attracting the right volunteers, or they feel like they’re not engaging communities in the way that they would like to? What’s one thing you think they should be doing?

Catherine: Probably the most important thing is to really invest in the kids. When I’m saying kids, I mean 15 to 25. That needs to be your primary focus. One of the biggest traps that are happening right now in most organizations that require volunteers is leaning on the people that have always done it, and they are burning out, they are aging out. They deserve to be able to take a break without feeling guilty, or maybe their hands need to be taken off of something a little bit so that someone else can have that opportunity. If you are depending on exhausted people, the face that you’re putting out there is not the best face for your organization. They deserve a break, and we deserve more new ideas and fresh blood and opportunities. If we don’t focus on that age group, no one else is going to.

Tobi: Yeah, absolutely. Catherine, this has been really fun just to hear some volunteer leadership stories, to talk about how we might shift how we’re talking about and seeking volunteer talent in the community, thinking about what kind of lens we should be viewing things with. One last question I love to ask all my guests: what are you most excited about in the year ahead?

Catherine: Honestly, it’s just having more conversations. All my video interviews are done this way virtually for the most part so I can record them, and seeing people in their minds and verbally walk through their experiences and thinking about things that they haven’t thought about in ten years or twenty years, it is so fun and so encouraging. I love being able to talk about other people. Sometimes we spend a lot of time talking about ourselves and the things that we’re doing, and I love being able to get away from myself and highlight what other people are doing. There’s some great things out there that no one will ever know about. I will continue to be able to do that. I don’t think there’s a magic number of people that I want to interview and talk to. Anyone that’s interested in being a part of Community Positive and sharing their story just needs to reach out to me. I love to hear stories. I think we have been able to do interviews with people that have lived in 36 different states in the United States. So love to be able to get to all 50 and hear all the different experiences.

Tobi: Awesome. So folks would go to communitypositive.com and look for what on that webpage to help share their story?

Catherine: If they want to share their story, there’s a contact page on there and they can just click on the link or contact. There’s multiple on every single page. It’ll say “Contact Us.” You can also join the email distribution list if you want to see the first interviews that are out. If you have more questions about the book, it’s communitypositive.com/ready.

Tobi: So everybody, get your hands on this book. It’s called Nobody Starts Ready: How Ordinary People Make a Real Difference Where They Live. Catherine’s book is out now. You can go on the website. You can find it wherever you like to buy your books. You can find Catherine on LinkedIn as well. We’ll put all these links in the show notes. Go grab that book for a little bit of inspiration. If you’re feeling a little crispy, a little burnt out, a little tired, sometimes it’s good to read stories and reflect on why we’re all in this business in the first place, which is helping people, helping volunteers grow, helping communities thrive, helping the people that our organization is set up to help. Sometimes we need to see outside of our organization for a little inspiration. I encourage you to go grab the book.

Catherine, thank you so much for joining me today. This has been a fantastic conversation.

Gang, if you like this interview and you want to share it with a friend, I’d love that. Share it with a colleague or someone who could use a little inspiration. If you enjoy the pod, give us a star rating. We like five stars because we get in front of more people that way. Rate and review us. We’d love to hear more about what you want to hear on the Volunteer Nation podcast.

I will be taking a hiatus at some point this summer, not quite yet, but I’ll let y’all know when that’s going to happen. My first time. We’re up to like 220 episodes of weekly episodes. I think I’ve deserved a break. I want to work on the book and then come back with some new ideas for the pod.

Catherine, thanks for joining me so much. Have a fantastic rest of your week. It’s been so great to have you. Everybody else, thank you for listening. We’ll see you next week, same time, same place on the Volunteer Nation podcast.

Catherine: No break. You deserve it. Thank you for having me.

Tobi: Thank you for listening to this episode of the Volunteer Nation podcast. If you enjoyed it, please be sure to subscribe, rate, and review so that we can reach more people like you who want to improve the impact of their good cause. For more tips and notes from the show, check us out at tobijohnson.com. We’ll see you next week for another installment of Volunteer Nation.