By Amy Rabideau Silvers

​Meagan Holman is new to her job as Civic Engagement Manager at the Nonprofit Center of Milwaukee, but not new to civic engagement or nonprofit work in Milwaukee. She took time out on a busy afternoon—think staff members’ kids helping on a clean-the-office day—to talk about her hopes and goals for the new position.
 
NPC: You've got an interesting background that informs your work at NPC. Can you tell us about that?

Meagan: I’m probably best known for my work in local government, especially for my time on the MPS School Board, but I’ve actually worked for over a decade in the nonprofit sector.
 
It feels good to be back in the nonprofit world. This is a great fit for my passion and experience. There’s so much work to be done, not only delivering specific programs, but trying to connect people and increase the capacity of their organizations.
 
NPC: In your new role, you'll be very involved in NPC's Volunteer Milwaukee program. Are there any changes or new directions that you can tell us about for this program?

Meagan: Volunteerism in Milwaukee is amazing. Milwaukee has the third highest rate of volunteers in the whole country for larger communities—31 percent of adults volunteer. There are things that Volunteer Milwaukee has been doing that most people don’t know, and I want to make sure people know and utilize all we have to offer.
 
For example, the Service Enterprise Initiative, it’s like the Good Housekeeping Seal of approval for nonprofit programs. It means you value volunteers and see them as a part of your mission. We provide the path to certification for agencies in Milwaukee and we want to keep expanding that opportunity.
 
NPC: What does NPC mean by "civic engagement"? What does that include for Volunteer Milwaukee?

Meagan: When you say, ‘Are you a volunteer?’ people think of what we call hands-and-hearts work—serving a meal or running a book drive—and that’s crucial. Imagine our society without those volunteers.
 
But when we talk about civic engagement, it’s something at a different level. Do you sit on your church’s board of governance? Do you sit on the board of a nonprofit? When you write a letter to the editor or connect someone you know with a cause, you’ve been civically involved.
 
There are so many ways we connect to each other. It’s the informal ties that bind us as well as the more formal ones.
 
NPC: Why is civic engagement important for businesses and for organizations?

Meagan: We do have a really active business council, the Business Volunteer Council of Greater Milwaukee. You can imagine how active their workers are in the community. We can work with their schedules and honor their skills and that’s part of what we do, making those connections and helping people volunteer.
 
People are looking for work-life balance—they want to give back—and we want to give people the tools to connect what they do at work to something that gives back.
 
NPC: What are the programs you're working on—both ones that have existed previously at Volunteer Milwaukee, and new ones?

Meagan: I want people to know about all the really innovative things that are happening in this small building. Volunteer Milwaukee connects people to volunteer opportunities. Someone will say, ‘What can I do for Martin Luther King Day?’ Or ‘I want to tutor.’
 
We’re also helping our Nonprofit Center members talk to each other and bring in new members. There’s a shift in who volunteers. There are more Baby Boomers retiring who want to volunteer. There’s the Millennials who engage digitally, and want both flexibility and structure. And there’s my kids’ generation, what they call Generation Z, who have always been digital. If they participate at the rate of the others, it will be amazing.
 
We’re trying to move the needle toward hope and justice and all the things we believe in by meeting people where they are, with opportunities that are meaningful to them.
 
NPC: What was appealing to you about coming to work at NPC?
 
Meagan: We do a lot more work than people know, and I want to be a part of that and a part of the team that gets that message out. We want to help people make their organizations stronger and make our community stronger, and the nonprofit sector at its best does both of those things.
 
The bottom line for me is being able to make a difference. It’s kind of an honor to wake up every day and do that.
 
NPC: What do you like to do when you're not working?
 
Meagan: I have a big family, and I love to take our kids out to participate in everything Milwaukee has to offer. I love food, so you will often find me cooking or checking out a new restaurant.  When I have the time, I like to travel or participate in volunteer service myself.

​​By Erika Burghardt
 
Bonnie Andrews, Volunteer Milwaukee Manager at NPC, recently shifted to a part-time role with the organization after 16 years of full-time leadership and service, and after receiving the 2016 Governor’s Volunteer Engagement Award this June. We took the opportunity to ask her to reflect on her time with Volunteer Milwaukee and NPC, the changes she’s seen in Milwaukee volunteerism, and what she plans to do next.
 
NPC: What is your favorite experience from all the years you’ve spent on volunteerism?

Bonnie: Volunteer Milwaukee connects volunteers with opportunities to serve, so our customers are both the volunteers and the nonprofits.

Every year we have a volunteer celebration and we get nominations of people who are doing great work in the community – but thy are often the unsung heroes out there doing terrific things every day, and I love meeting them. Working with the volunteers, people who want to help out of the goodness of their own heart, is wonderful. It’s so satisfying to meet people who are good and want to help.

My other favorite thing has to do with working with the nonprofits, especially with the Service Enterprise Initiative. This is a national model to train and support nonprofits as they engage volunteers throughout the organization and at every level to help them accomplish their mission through volunteer engagement. The Service Enterprise Initiative is something I’ll continue to work on, and we are recruiting now for our next group to begin in November. 

NPC: What have you learned about volunteerism during your time at Volunteer Milwaukee and NPC?

Bonnie: One of the things I’ve learned is that there’s a role for everyone to play here. No matter who you are, there is something you can do to help the community as a volunteer. On the nonprofit side, I’ve learned that all nonprofits are unique. The way they engage volunteers might be different, they all might have a slightly different process. Every nonprofit has to take the principles and best practices I’m giving them and customize them to fit their own unique organization. In order for volunteering to work well, it takes effort and commitment on both the part of the volunteer and the nonprofit to make it successful.

NPC: You mention there’s a role for everyone to play through volunteering within the community. How would you suggest to someone to get involved in volunteering who has never done it before?

Bonnie: For some people it’s about what they care about. Some will say, “This problem really bothers me, so I want to help the cause to solve it.” Other people may not be as driven by the cause, but have a skill they want to use, or they just want to interact with people.

It starts with looking at yourself, determining what your motivation is for volunteering, and following that; that’s when you’ll be successful, when you understand more about yourself and why you want to volunteer.

You can start your search by doing a search on our website, volunteermilwaukee.org. The other thing is to just be open, because requests will come your way, or you’ll read an article online and you’ll see how you can help. If you determine what you’d like to do and are open for volunteering, if you keep your ears and heart open, you’ll find a place.

NPC: How have things changed in volunteerism over the years?

Bonnie: I think millennials wants something different than people in past decades. Everyone’s volunteering; students are volunteering, there’s service learning-goal directed volunteering, millennials are volunteering and they may want to volunteer for more short-term opportunities and not make the long-term commitment, so it may be more skill-based or project volunteering. Families are volunteering.

Corporate volunteering has increased. There’s more of an interest on companies to get their employees out volunteering. Because more people are volunteering, more people see the options. Some people volunteer just because they want to help, and other people have a specific learning objective. They want to gain skills they can use in their work or in finding a job. People want to make connections, or get into a new field. Some people volunteer because they want to help, and there are lots ad lots of other reasons.

NPC: In your opinion, why is it that Milwaukee is so good at volunteering? How did we get to be number three of all the cities in America?

Bonnie: Isn’t that amazing! We have been in the top five for a number of years. In order for us to be in this place, it requires volunteers who want to help. There’s all kinds of research done about why people volunteer, and one of the reasons is commitment to community. People who are long-term residents of a community feel a connection, and that’s true of people in the Midwest. People from the Midwest volunteer more than people in any other parts of the country.

We also have the non-profits who want to engage them. There has to be a place for those people to volunteer and we have that too. We have a lot of non-profits in Milwaukee, which includes schools, congregations, and other organizations who might utilize volunteers. Our non-profits are ready to engage volunteers effectively.
​
The third thing you need is a connector. You need a way for people to find one another, and that’s where we come in. We have a resource here, Volunteer Milwaukee, that helps people connect. We have all those three things in place.

NPC: You’ve given a lot of time and energy into promoting engagement in the community. How would you like people to remember your time with Volunteer Milwaukee?

Bonnie: Everybody wants to feel like they make a difference in the work that they do every day. We had a volunteer here a number of years ago who did some marketing materials for us, and she said, “What we’re all about is more people volunteering more effectively.”

Wouldn’t it be great if the result of the work we are doing is that more people volunteer and the nonprofits engage them more effectively to increase the impact on the community.

I was at a meeting a couple months ago and heard the story of a man, an older gentleman, who had a serious surgery and he couldn’t wait to get back to volunteering. That’s where his connection and meaning came from. No matter who you are, there’s a place for you as a volunteer, and it can be so satisfying.

​Erika Burghardt is a volunteer blogger for NPC. She works as an analyst in the retail industry. As a student at Indiana University, she organized and publicized fundraisers benefiting the Jimmy V. Cancer Research Foundation and the Ryan White Infectious Disease Center at Riley Hospital for Children.

Blog from the Big Chair

​By Rob Meiksins, CEO
 
The other day I was attending a hearing for the Block Grant allocations for Milwaukee nonprofits. A group of about 150 of us were gathered at the lovely new St. Ann Center for Intergenerational Care on North Avenue, sharing our thoughts with members of the City’s committee overseeing these things.

One by one people came to the microphone and they spoke. They spoke about their work, they spoke about their neighborhood, they spoke about how good they are for the neighborhood. They spoke about how much more block grant funding they should get in order to continue doing the good work they do. Of course that was not likely to happen since the amount of money for block grant usage is going down, if anything, not up.
 
But then a young man came to the podium and he said something that made me stop and think – something to the effect of “I don't see a lot of people like me here. Everyone here is getting on in years. You've been speaking for many years saying the same things. If the same things are still problems, then maybe we need to find some new voices and some new ideas, because what you're doing isn’t working.”
 
Ouch! I'm one of those older people he was referring to, and there were a lot of people in the room whom I've known for a long time. I felt like running and hiding. But instead, I started listening even more closely. The young man was right. People who are about my age were saying the same things I remember from a block grant hearing years ago.
 
Where were the younger people with new ideas? Why aren’t they at this meeting?
 
But then the next day an old friend came to visit me in my office. He was really excited about this idea he had that he wanted to share. He'd been thinking about his years in the nonprofit sector and realized that he like most of us was guilty of putting bandaids on the problems when really the sector should go to root causes and fix things. He laid out for me a whole way of thinking about this work, and how to move it forward.
 
Older guy, but new idea. He wasn’t at the block grant meeting either.
 
I refuse to believe that there are no younger people in the Milwaukee nonprofit sector who have good new ideas. And there are some people who have been around the block a couple of times who have some good new ideas based on what they've learned over the years. So where are these new ideas and why don’t we hear about them?
 
I had a chat the other day with a fellow nonprofit executive and we talked about a logjam at the leadership level of the nonprofit sector. The only people who get to air their ideas about problems and how Milwaukee nonprofits can address them are the people at the top of the nonprofit food chain – the chief executive staff person is the one invited to the microphone to speak. What the young man at the block grant hearing saw was that many of the people who were at the helm of Milwaukee nonprofit organizations 20 years ago are still there. Maybe they've changed the organization they're with, but they're still the same people, and they still have the mic. 
 
A lot of these people, these leaders, are very good at what they do and deserve to continue to have a voice. Just because they're still saying what they said a few years ago doesn’t mean they're wrong. In fact, they're probably right in saying the same issues are still around.

The problem is that we're not ALSO hearing the new ideas, the new voices, from emerging leaders. They don't have a microphone to walk up to and tell the world what they're thinking.
 
So, here’s that microphone. If you have a good new idea about how to lead in the Milwaukee nonprofit sector, how to move our sector forward, this is your moment – tell us about your idea. Then come to NPC's Nonprofit Leadership Summit on October 13, convened in partnership with University of Wisconsin Parkside, University Wisconsin Milwaukee School of Continuing Education, IFF and the Young Nonprofit Professionals Network. If your idea is selected, you can share it at the summit – and if it's picked by summit participants, NPC will work with you for a year to help you move your idea forward toward implementation. 
 
Older people like my friend, and all the young people: we want to hear your good new idea. Let’s stop having the same people talking to the same people and saying the same things about the same subjects. That's not working. 

Young or old, we don’t care. We want new. Register your idea here.