I’m headed to Florida for ASAE & The Center’s Great Ideas Conference – three days of education, creativity and fun! At the center of the activity will be an “unsession” on volunteerism in associations. The objective is to generate creative ideas that can help associations create strategies and solutions to this critical and often perplexing issue.
So what’s an unsession? Well, it’s essentially a place where members can go and hold their own conversations at any point during an annual meeting or conference. It’s basically a room with a flip chart. We can document any takeaways and tape them to the wall for others who use the room at any point. Matt Baehr wrote about one from an ASAE meeting that sparked our ideas. Over on Wikipedia, you can get a broader definition of an unconference.
In our case, we’re going to not only have a collaboration space at the conference, we’ve created one in virtual space so everyone can chime in:
- Facebook – Future of Volunteerism Unsession group
Plus, we’re capturing all the ideas in Associapedia and on Acronym.
To get the conversation going, I’m tagging the following bloggers to help answer a nagging question – how can we create volunteer jobs that don’t require being on a committee, a long-term commitment or gobs of time? So, share five short-term, ad-hoc volunteer jobs you’d love to have and then tag five more bloggers.
The five volunteer jobs I’ve love to have:
- Conducting a workshop for volunteer leaders on effective volunteering
- Being a guinea pig for a new training workshop (did this once for ASAE & loved learning a new subject while giving feedback to create a new program)
- Teaching kids a new dance (yep, really…I wear the hat of choreographer for middle school drama club!)
- Review an article, manuscript or document to give feedback (particularly if it’s on a new subject for me!)
- Make 3 phone calls on behalf of my organization (but not to ask for money!)
Your turn …