Team Approach For Non-Profit Committees

The team approach is a more reliable process for non-profit committee structures because of the benefits of technology, changes in volunteer availability, and growing need for leadership. It is believed that due to changes in the age of our world's population, volunteerism is on an extreme decline. These volunteers are decreasing in age, want to be respected for their contributions, and use technology to produce quick results (Graff, 2005). According to Tierney in the Leadership Deficit (year?), "Over the next decade nonprofits will need to find some 640,000 new executives, nearly two and a half times the number currently employed. To meet the growing demand for talent, the author offers creative ways of finding and recruiting new leaders from a wide range of groups, including business, the military, and the growing pool of retirees" (para. 1). Thus, it is important for non-profits to alter the structure in which they serve the public and manage the organization. In this paper, strategies for altering the committee structure to a more self managed and project propelled team approach will be discussed.

Since the trends point to a younger generation of volunteers, there is a greater need to provide training opportunities, clearer structures, acknowledgement and appraisals on a more regular basis, volunteer advancement opportunities, and structures for replacing themselves in their roles. Graff even acknowledges that there are impacts in the non-profits management of these volunteers. For instance she mentions it affects "how we supervise volunteers, the kind of support we offer them, how we recognize their efforts and how we manage their performance" (author? Year? p. 27). Many times these volunteers will also not have the individual support networks that a more mature longer term volunteer would have acquired. Thus, placing these younger volunteers on a planning committee with clear project or program descriptions would allow them to contribute while getting trained. Within the committee structures proposed by Doug Eddie (year) in the article 'Can Standing Committees Contribute to High Impact Governing', these volunteers could then transition from the planning committee to the governance committee if a commitment to a long term volunteer assignment was demonstrated. Once a volunteer knows the structures and with the aid of email and computer transmittal of documents, it is becoming easier for those volunteers to submit work within their committee. This ease of performance and greater individual accountability allows for the transition from a discussion based planning committee to a results oriented production team as described in by Roper and Phillips in Integrating self-managed work teams into project management.

Given that many nonprofits are already over taxed financially and have personnel time constraints, it is difficult to fathom how an organization could transition from a long term managerial volunteer