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Sat / act prep online guides and tips, how to write a great community service essay.

College Admissions , Extracurriculars

Are you applying to a college or a scholarship that requires a community service essay? Do you know how to write an essay that will impress readers and clearly show the impact your work had on yourself and others?

Read on to learn step-by-step instructions for writing a great community service essay that will help you stand out and be memorable.

What Is a Community Service Essay? Why Do You Need One?

A community service essay is an essay that describes the volunteer work you did and the impact it had on you and your community. Community service essays can vary widely depending on specific requirements listed in the application, but, in general, they describe the work you did, why you found the work important, and how it benefited people around you.

Community service essays are typically needed for two reasons:

#1: To Apply to College

• Some colleges require students to write community service essays as part of their application or to be eligible for certain scholarships.
• You may also choose to highlight your community service work in your personal statement.

#2: To Apply for Scholarships

• Some scholarships are specifically awarded to students with exceptional community service experiences, and many use community service essays to help choose scholarship recipients.
• Green Mountain College offers one of the most famous of these scholarships. Their "Make a Difference Scholarship" offers full tuition, room, and board to students who have demonstrated a significant, positive impact through their community service

Getting Started With Your Essay

In the following sections, I'll go over each step of how to plan and write your essay. I'll also include sample excerpts for you to look through so you can get a better idea of what readers are looking for when they review your essay.

Step 1: Know the Essay Requirements

Before your start writing a single word, you should be familiar with the essay prompt. Each college or scholarship will have different requirements for their essay, so make sure you read these carefully and understand them.

Specific things to pay attention to include:

• Length requirement
• Application deadline
• The main purpose or focus of the essay
• If the essay should follow a specific structure

Below are three real community service essay prompts. Read through them and notice how much they vary in terms of length, detail, and what information the writer should include.

From the Equitable Excellence Scholarship:

"Describe your outstanding achievement in depth and provide the specific planning, training, goals, and steps taken to make the accomplishment successful. Include details about your role and highlight leadership you provided. Your essay must be a minimum of 350 words but not more than 600 words."

From the Laura W. Bush Traveling Scholarship:

"Essay (up to 500 words, double spaced) explaining your interest in being considered for the award and how your proposed project reflects or is related to both UNESCO's mandate and U.S. interests in promoting peace by sharing advances in education, science, culture, and communications."

From the LULAC National Scholarship Fund:

"Please type or print an essay of 300 words (maximum) on how your academic studies will contribute to your personal & professional goals. In addition, please discuss any community service or extracurricular activities you have been involved in that relate to your goals."

Step 2: Brainstorm Ideas

Even after you understand what the essay should be about, it can still be difficult to begin writing. Answer the following questions to help brainstorm essay ideas. You may be able to incorporate your answers into your essay.

• What community service activity that you've participated in has meant the most to you?
• What is your favorite memory from performing community service?
• Why did you decide to begin community service?
• What made you decide to volunteer where you did?
• How has your community service changed you?
• How has your community service helped others?
• How has your community service affected your plans for the future?

You don't need to answer all the questions, but if you find you have a lot of ideas for one of two of them, those may be things you want to include in your essay.

Writing Your Essay

How you structure your essay will depend on the requirements of the scholarship or school you are applying to. You may give an overview of all the work you did as a volunteer, or highlight a particularly memorable experience. You may focus on your personal growth or how your community benefited.

Regardless of the specific structure requested, follow the guidelines below to make sure your community service essay is memorable and clearly shows the impact of your work.

Samples of mediocre and excellent essays are included below to give you a better idea of how you should draft your own essay.

Step 1: Hook Your Reader In

You want the person reading your essay to be interested, so your first sentence should hook them in and entice them to read more. A good way to do this is to start in the middle of the action. Your first sentence could describe you helping build a house, releasing a rescued animal back to the wild, watching a student you tutored read a book on their own, or something else that quickly gets the reader interested. This will help set your essay apart and make it more memorable.

Compare these two opening sentences:

"I have volunteered at the Wishbone Pet Shelter for three years."

"The moment I saw the starving, mud-splattered puppy brought into the shelter with its tail between its legs, I knew I'd do whatever I could to save it."

The first sentence is a very general, bland statement. The majority of community service essays probably begin a lot like it, but it gives the reader little information and does nothing to draw them in. On the other hand, the second sentence begins immediately with action and helps persuade the reader to keep reading so they can learn what happened to the dog.

Step 2: Discuss the Work You Did

Once you've hooked your reader in with your first sentence, tell them about your community service experiences. State where you work, when you began working, how much time you've spent there, and what your main duties include. This will help the reader quickly put the rest of the essay in context and understand the basics of your community service work.

Not including basic details about your community service could leave your reader confused.

Step 3: Include Specific Details

It's the details of your community service that make your experience unique and memorable, so go into the specifics of what you did.

For example, don't just say you volunteered at a nursing home; talk about reading Mrs. Johnson her favorite book, watching Mr. Scott win at bingo, and seeing the residents play games with their grandchildren at the family day you organized. Try to include specific activities, moments, and people in your essay. Having details like these let the readers really understand what work you did and how it differs from other volunteer experiences.

Compare these two passages:

"For my volunteer work, I tutored children at a local elementary school. I helped them improve their math skills and become more confident students."

"As a volunteer at York Elementary School, I worked one-on-one with second and third graders who struggled with their math skills, particularly addition, subtraction, and fractions. As part of my work, I would create practice problems and quizzes and try to connect math to the students' interests. One of my favorite memories was when Sara, a student I had been working with for several weeks, told me that she enjoyed the math problems I had created about a girl buying and selling horses so much that she asked to help me create math problems for other students."

The first passage only gives basic information about the work done by the volunteer; there is very little detail included, and no evidence is given to support her claims. How did she help students improve their math skills? How did she know they were becoming more confident?

The second passage is much more detailed. It recounts a specific story and explains more fully what kind of work the volunteer did, as well as a specific instance of a student becoming more confident with her math skills. Providing more detail in your essay helps support your claims as well as make your essay more memorable and unique.

Step 4: Show Your Personality

It would be very hard to get a scholarship or place at a school if none of your readers felt like they knew much about you after finishing your essay, so make sure that your essay shows your personality. The way to do this is to state your personal strengths, then provide examples to support your claims. Take some time to think about which parts of your personality you would like your essay to highlight, then write about specific examples to show this.

• If you want to show that you're a motivated leader, describe a time when you organized an event or supervised other volunteers.
• If you want to show your teamwork skills, write about a time you helped a group of people work together better.
• If you want to show that you're a compassionate animal lover, write about taking care of neglected shelter animals and helping each of them find homes.

Step 5: State What You Accomplished

After you have described your community service and given specific examples of your work, you want to begin to wrap your essay up by stating your accomplishments. What was the impact of your community service? Did you build a house for a family to move into? Help students improve their reading skills? Clean up a local park? Make sure the impact of your work is clear; don't be worried about bragging here.

If you can include specific numbers, that will also strengthen your essay. Saying "I delivered meals to 24 home-bound senior citizens" is a stronger example than just saying "I delivered meals to lots of senior citizens."

Also be sure to explain why your work matters. Why is what you did important? Did it provide more parks for kids to play in? Help students get better grades? Give people medical care who would otherwise not have gotten it? This is an important part of your essay, so make sure to go into enough detail that your readers will know exactly what you accomplished and how it helped your community.

"My biggest accomplishment during my community service was helping to organize a family event at the retirement home. The children and grandchildren of many residents attended, and they all enjoyed playing games and watching movies together."

"The community service accomplishment that I'm most proud of is the work I did to help organize the First Annual Family Fun Day at the retirement home. My job was to design and organize fun activities that senior citizens and their younger relatives could enjoy. The event lasted eight hours and included ten different games, two performances, and a movie screening with popcorn. Almost 200 residents and family members attended throughout the day. This event was important because it provided an opportunity for senior citizens to connect with their family members in a way they aren't often able to. It also made the retirement home seem more fun and enjoyable to children, and we have seen an increase in the number of kids coming to visit their grandparents since the event."

The second passage is stronger for a variety of reasons. First, it goes into much more detail about the work the volunteer did. The first passage only states that she helped "organize a family event." That really doesn't tell readers much about her work or what her responsibilities were. The second passage is much clearer; her job was to "design and organize fun activities."

The second passage also explains the event in more depth. A family day can be many things; remember that your readers are likely not familiar with what you're talking about, so details help them get a clearer picture.

Lastly, the second passage makes the importance of the event clear: it helped residents connect with younger family members, and it helped retirement homes seem less intimidating to children, so now some residents see their grand kids more often.

Step 6: Discuss What You Learned

One of the final things to include in your essay should be the impact that your community service had on you. You can discuss skills you learned, such as carpentry, public speaking, animal care, or another skill.

You can also talk about how you changed personally. Are you more patient now? More understanding of others? Do you have a better idea of the type of career you want? Go into depth about this, but be honest. Don't say your community service changed your life if it didn't because trite statements won't impress readers.

In order to support your statements, provide more examples. If you say you're more patient now, how do you know this? Do you get less frustrated while playing with your younger siblings? Are you more willing to help group partners who are struggling with their part of the work? You've probably noticed by now that including specific examples and details is one of the best ways to create a strong and believable essay .

"As a result of my community service, I learned a lot about building houses and became a more mature person."

"As a result of my community service, I gained hands-on experience in construction. I learned how to read blueprints, use a hammer and nails, and begin constructing the foundation of a two-bedroom house. Working on the house could be challenging at times, but it taught me to appreciate the value of hard work and be more willing to pitch in when I see someone needs help. My dad has just started building a shed in our backyard, and I offered to help him with it because I know from my community service how much work it is. I also appreciate my own house more, and I know how lucky I am to have a roof over my head."

The second passage is more impressive and memorable because it describes the skills the writer learned in more detail and recounts a specific story that supports her claim that her community service changed her and made her more helpful.

Step 7: Finish Strong

Just as you started your essay in a way that would grab readers' attention, you want to finish your essay on a strong note as well. A good way to end your essay is to state again the impact your work had on you, your community, or both. Reiterate how you changed as a result of your community service, why you found the work important, or how it helped others.

Compare these two concluding statements:

"In conclusion, I learned a lot from my community service at my local museum, and I hope to keep volunteering and learning more about history."

"To conclude, volunteering at my city's American History Museum has been a great experience. By leading tours and participating in special events, I became better at public speaking and am now more comfortable starting conversations with people. In return, I was able to get more community members interested in history and our local museum. My interest in history has deepened, and I look forward to studying the subject in college and hopefully continuing my volunteer work at my university's own museum."

The second passage takes each point made in the first passage and expands upon it. In a few sentences, the second passage is able to clearly convey what work the volunteer did, how she changed, and how her volunteer work benefited her community.

The author of the second passage also ends her essay discussing her future and how she'd like to continue her community service, which is a good way to wrap things up because it shows your readers that you are committed to community service for the long-term.

What's Next?

Are you applying to a community service scholarship or thinking about it? We have a complete list of all the community service scholarships available to help get your search started!

Do you need a community service letter as well? We have a step-by-step guide that will tell you how to get a great reference letter from your community service supervisor.

Thinking about doing community service abroad? Before you sign up, read our guide on some of the hazards of international volunteer trips and how to know if it's the right choice for you.

Christine graduated from Michigan State University with degrees in Environmental Biology and Geography and received her Master's from Duke University. In high school she scored in the 99th percentile on the SAT and was named a National Merit Finalist. She has taught English and biology in several countries.

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The Positive Impact of Volunteering on Leadership Skills, Essay Example

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Volunteering is becoming one of the most effective ways of teaching people work skills before they start a job. Several authors (Ockenden & Hutin, 2008; Hudoba, 2014) confirm that volunteering experience helps young people gain experience communicating with diverse populations, and positively impacts their leadership development. A recent NCVO (2012) report also states that volunteering is one of the most successful pathways for people who have been off from work for a long time. It increases their employability, as well as helps improve their leadership skills, confidence, and communication. The below essay paper will look at the various benefits of volunteering, and argues that having an experience as a volunteer would positively impact their career development and chances. Indeed, volunteering provides personal growth opportunities and experience for many young people and those who are looking to return to work.

There are several benefits of volunteering, and these have been confirmed by various authors. Employability improvement is one of the main benefits of volunteering. Ockenden & Stuart (2014, p. 4) created a comprehensive study focusing on the relationship between volunteering experience and employability/leadership development, and found that “young people feel that they develop confidence and self-esteem and learn new skills through volunteering and social action, including organisational skills, communication and group skills”. Further, the author states that young volunteers can benefit from several positive impacts of volunteering, such as developing systems thinking, extended social horizon, a caring attitude, and skills needed for self-development.  Volunteering further provides people with a new perspective of social issues: they get to meet people through their participation in projects from every walk of life.

Volunteers can build essential skills through taking part in volunteering projects. Hudoba (2014) mentions that volunteering opens opportunities for  building leadership skills. This means that influencing and following others are all a part of volunteering experience. Those without any work experience, for example, will be able to learn how to play by the rules and follow directions, and later become those who can come up with their own initiatives and get recognition for them. It is also important to note that volunteer groups –  as Hudoba (2014) confirms – are extremely democratic, therefore, leadership roles are often randomly assigned to individuals who exhibit specific skills. This means that young people who volunteer are more likely to realize their own potential and leadership strengths before they enter the world of employment. They become more aware of their weaknesses and development areas, as well, learn to work as a part of a team. At the same time, they will learn how to create consensus, clearly communicate messages, and engage others in their personal mission. Apart from realizing one’s own potential, volunteering can help individuals find their career direction and their strengths.

Leadership development through volunteer group leadership is also a proven benefit. Ockenden and Hutin (2008) examined the role of leaders in groups. The authors found that volunteer-led groups are extremely democratic and provide everyone a chance to take part in the decision-making process. The authors (Ockenden &  Hutin, 2008) state that leaders learn humility and team building skills in their role. This means that leaders understand the importance of clear communication, learn the methods of effective collaboration and engaging people to follow them. All the above skills are needed for further leadership roles.

Finally, according to the NCVO’s policy report (2012), colunteering helps improve communication skills and confidence. Nonetheless, those who are looking for management position will be able to get the basic skills for searching for the right job, managing time and others, taking part in discussion, and evaluating their own performance. While the report does not directly state that volunteering has a positive impact on people’s leadership skills, it confirms that it increases one’s employability.

Patel’s (2010) study also confirms that volunteering improves business and management skills, and increases the individual’s chance for achieving professional success. Through learning new people skills, building confidence, obtaining important organization and planning skills, developing mentoring abilities, communication, and networking, individuals who volunteer can boost their career options. According to the study (Patel, 2010) 94% of all participating employers believed that volunteering added to applicants’  skills. This means that people who take part in volunteering programs will become more skilled in every area, including leadership and management.

Volunteering can improve individuals’ work related skills and employability. At the same time, several studies have noted that important leadership skills can be gained through volunteering, such as communication, collaboration, management, idea creation, and vision development. Therefore, people who volunteer are not only becoming more skilled and more employable than those who do not, but they can learn more about their skills, abilities, and development areas. Through understanding their own abilities, they can become better leaders. Young people without work experience will certainly benefit from volunteering for organizations that have a democratic approach to leadership and often assign responsibilities and leadership roles to individuals in the group. That way, people will become more responsible leaders, better collaborators, and more organized managers than those who simply apply for a position straight after finishing their training.

Hudoba, S. (2014) Volunteering: A key to leadership success. Retrieved from https://chapters.theiia.org/los-angeles/Documents/Volunteering%20The%20Key%20To           %20Leadership%20Success%20v4.pdf

NCVO (2012) V olunteering: a valuable pathway to employability . Retrieved from https://www.ncvo.org.uk/images/documents/practical_support/volunteering/vsc-policy- final.pdf

Ockenden, N. & Stuart (2014) Review of evidence on the outcomes of youth volunteering, social action and leadership . Institute for Volunteering Research. Retrieved from       http://thirdsectorimpact.eu/site/assets/uploads/page/documents-for-researchers/TSI_impact-report_sports-leaders-literature-review-dec-2014.pdf

Ockenden, N., & Hutin, M. (2008). Volunteering to lead: a study of leadership in small, volunteer-led groups.  Institute for Volunteering Research .

Patel, N. (2010) Develop leadership skills through volunteering. Retrieved from http://ieee-nh.org/Docs/2010-08-NP1.pdf

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Create a new account, forgot password, sign in to myima, grow leadership skills through volunteering.

January 01, 2022

By: Lisa Book , CMA, CSCA, CFM

Ask the right questions when selecting a volunteer role to help maximize your impact and the leadership skills you can gain.

Volunteering—particularly with an industry or professional organization—provides an opportunity to develop your leadership skills in many ways. Volunteers can gain different perspectives, build relationships, and master new skills—often, ones they might not have the time for or opportunity to work on at their jobs.

To explore the ways volunteering can build leadership skills, I spoke with IMA ® (Institute of Management Accountants) Leadership Academy faculty members Rinku Bhattacharya and Pem Smith about our experiences volunteering for IMA. Here are our top seven tips for making the most of your efforts.

1. Learn planning and organization skills . Volunteers learn to plan effective meetings, organize events, and coordinate with other volunteers. After I joined IMA’s Louisville Chapter board, I spearheaded our student nights, continuing professional education (CPE) conferences, and other events. The inventories and activities I coordinated for the chapter required leading a diverse group outside my day job, learning to plan and execute time-sensitive activities with many moving parts, and building in contingencies. I was able to translate those skills developed as a volunteer into my professional role as a cost accountant, which enabled me to better plan and execute the company’s physical inventories.

2. Improve your time management . Volunteering pushes you to learn how to juggle work, family, and volunteer priorities to maintain a reasonable balance. A friend and mentor advised Smith that volunteering in a professional association could help his career, but it requires active involvement, making reasonable commitments, and prioritizing meeting them. It taught him the value of splitting tasks into manageable pieces and getting the essential work done on time.

3. Develop mentoring skills . Most volunteer roles rely on more experienced volunteers to share information and knowledge with newer recruits, and as you change roles, you mentor new members who assume a role you previously filled. Bhattacharya was unfamiliar with the concept of mentoring when she moved to the United States to attend university. As a young professional, she was appreciative of the support she received from other professionals, but she was unsure how to pay it forward. She identified several structured mentoring outlets. In her particular environment, she has developed her skills while serving as a mentor for IMA’s Young Professional Leadership Experience. She serves on IMA’s Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion Committee and is spearheading an initiative to create a meaningful and rewarding experience for emerging volunteer leaders from a variety of backgrounds. And this can be done likewise within countless organizations and institutes.

4. Grow your people skills . Learn to motivate, communicate, and collaborate by working with people from diverse backgrounds and persuading others to assist in your cause. In my own volunteer work, I found myself leading significantly more experienced board members, many of whom had a decade or more of active service. It was great practice for how to develop a team and inspire change as a relative newcomer. I leveraged this experience when I stepped into my first supervisory role leading my company’s accounts payable department. Learning the value of diversity, mutual respect, strong communication, and cooperation in my previous volunteer roles helped me to build a successful team.

5. Find networking opportunities . Expand your network organically by breaking out of typical work circles and partnering with others from various industries and career stages. Smith hadn’t considered professional networking before joining IMA; like many, all his professional relationships came from colleagues at his job. Volunteering in IMA’s San Diego Chapter helped him to build relationships with hiring managers, recruiters, and professional peers. He was able to leverage these relationships to find mentors to further his professional development and offer advice to him. These relationships were deeper than casual acquaintances formed at events because they had worked together on volunteer projects and boards.

6. Experiment . Volunteering gives you the space to take risks without fear of financial or career repercussions. Having the freedom to experiment helps you to become a more versatile leader. Faced with dwindling attendance at our monthly CPE meetings, my local IMA chapter was stuck in a rut of repeating the same lineup every year and hoping for a different outcome. I appreciate the support of the chapter members in allowing me to experiment by switching to a full-day CPE conference and incorporating more high-profile speakers. It also sparked in me the inspiration to put aside preconceptions at work. For example, when developing Indiana University Southeast’s first online introductory financial accounting class, I didn’t simply tweak my face-to-face class. I started from scratch. I found better ways of delivering my course and then translated those to my face-to-face sections. Along with a colleague, I developed an approach called “supported learning,” which received an innovation award, and I’ve since mentored other accounting faculty members in using this approach.

7. Get out of your comfort zone . Volunteering challenges you to work with new people and explore new surroundings. Bhattacharya isn’t comfortable speaking publicly. Being a part of the IMA Leadership Academy and making presentations with more confident, eloquent speakers has improved­­ her effectiveness making presentations and communicating effectively.

You can develop all these important leadership qualities by volunteering with IMA. It’s all about asking the right questions and taking a strategic approach to your volunteer roles. The Volunteer Service Leader Framework can help you navigate IMA’s various volunteer opportunities and choose the most appropriate role based on what leadership skills you want to hone, the level of impact you want to have (local, regional, or global), what interests you, and how much time you have available. The framework uses personas in combination with a deployment matrix of questions, considerations, and guidelines to help you scale your volunteerism. Your career will get a boost from building your leadership skills through strategic volunteering.

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January 2022

• IMA’s San Diego Chapter

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ORIGINAL RESEARCH article

The relationship between leadership behaviors and volunteer commitment: the role of volunteer satisfaction.

A correction has been applied to this article in:

Corrigendum: The Relationship Between Leadership Behaviors and Volunteer Commitment: The Role of Volunteer Satisfaction

• Read correction

• 1 Department of Human Sciences, Libera Università Maria Santissima Assunta (LUMSA) University, Rome, Italy
• 2 Department of Organisation Work and Technology, Lancaster University Management School, Bailrigg, United Kingdom

Despite the relative scarcity of studies on the impact of leadership styles on satisfaction and commitment of volunteers within non-profit organizations, this relationship plays a crucial role in fostering sustained volunteerism and volunteers' well-being. A questionnaire was administered to more than 200 volunteers involved in delivering social services in non-profit organizations from Central and Northern Italy. The questionnaire contained the Volunteer Satisfaction Index, the sub-scale on Affective Commitment of the Organizational Commitment Scale, and two sub-scales of the Key Leadership Behaviors, namely: Helping people to grow and lead, and Enabling learning and innovation. Socio-demographic data were collected as well. Findings revealed that leaders' actions oriented toward the enablement of learning and innovation have an effect on volunteers' affective commitment, through the full mediation of volunteer satisfaction. Leaders' actions oriented toward the growth and empowerment of volunteers, instead, did not show significant relationships with volunteer satisfaction and affective commitment.

Introduction

The relevance of the non-profit world.

Non-profit organizations (NPOs) are organizations committed to promoting the well-being of individuals, communities, and society through the delivery of their services ( Benevene and Cortini, 2010 ; Kong and Ramia, 2010 ; Dal Corso et al., 2019 ). NPOs are defined as private, independent, self-governed organizations, whose profits are not distributed to individuals or owners of stakeholders, but reinvested in the organizational mission, namely creating social value and contributing to general welfare ( Salamon and Anheier, 1992 ; Bahmani et al., 2012 ).

All NPOs rely—partially or totally—on volunteers to deliver their services and carry out other tasks, such as office work, fundraising, and event organization to mention a few ( Salamon and Anheier, 1992 ; Benevene and Cortini, 2010 ; Jiménez et al., 2010 ; Bahmani et al., 2012 ; Dal Corso et al., 2019 ). If all those who engaged in volunteering activities formed a country–the so-called “Volunteer Land” –this would be the ninth most populous country in the world, behind Russia and Bangladesh. In Europe alone, there are about 94 million people engaged in volunteering ( Salamon et al., 2013 ). As far as the Italian context is concerned, the volunteer rate is 12.6% among the adult population (i.e., more than 6 million people)—out of which 7.9% operate in an organized context ( ISTAT, 2019 ).

Thus, volunteers represent a crucial factor in the non-profit world. Their attraction, retention, and management are among the most strategic and challenging actions for NPOs ( Anheier and Salamon, 2006 ; Salamon et al., 2013 ; Nencini et al., 2016 ; Alfes et al., 2017 ). In fact, volunteers' management requires taking into consideration the differences between them and employees: unlike paid staff, volunteers can choose the NPOs they prefer and are not bounded by a legal contract, assigning them weekly hours of duty, tasks, and responsibilities; they are not selected or rewarded on the basis of their professional competences and skills; they choose freely when to start participating in the NPO's activities and are free to leave whenever they will ( Salamon and Anheier, 1992 ).

Most NPOs struggle to maintain their volunteers' engagement in the long term, although the number of people deciding to engage in volunteering activities is continually increasing and volunteers tend to continue volunteering over the course of their life, whether it is in the same organization, or in a different one ( Garner and Garner, 2011 ). In this respect it has to be stressed that sustained volunteerism is an important component of the NPOs' organizational performance not only because these organizations need volunteers to carry out many of their activities, but also because long-term volunteering generates a better trained, more experienced, and more highly skilled volunteer base ( Fairley et al., 2013 ).

Current research on sustained volunteerism suggests that when leaders are perceived positively, volunteers are more likely to be retained ( Catano et al., 2001 ; Avolio et al., 2004 ; Richardson and Vandenberg, 2005 ; Rowold and Rohmann, 2009 ; Senses-Ozyurt and Villicana-Reyna, 2016 ). Despite this, little is known about the role of leadership styles on sustained volunteerism.

Theoretical Basis of Sustained Volunteerism

Sustained volunteerism is commonly explained in light of the functional theory ( Clary et al., 1998 ) and the social exchange theory ( Blau, 1964 ).

The functional theory developed by Clary et al. (1998) and Clary and Snyder (1999) posits that volunteering provides opportunities to satisfy personal needs and drives. Clary and Snyder (1999 , p. 157) identified six main motives pushing people to engage in voluntary work: values (the opportunity to express their values in the actions taken); understanding (the opportunity to learn or exercise skills that are often unused); career (the opportunity of professional growth through the acquisition of skills and knowledge useful for one's career path); social (the opportunity to strengthen one's own social relationships); enhancement (the opportunity to grow and develop psychologically through volunteer activities); protective (the opportunity to reduce negative feelings, such as guilt, or to address personal problems). Individuals may look for fulfillment of different motives in performing their volunteer activities and tasks. In other words, “different people engage in the same volunteer activity but do so to fulfill different motives” ( Clary and Snyder, 1999 , p. 156). When volunteers satisfy their motivations through their specific experience within the organization, they achieve higher performance, and greater satisfaction for the activities carried out, which in fact constitute relevant predictive factors for the decision to start and continue volunteering ( Clary et al., 1998 ). The other theoretical basis of sustained volunteerism is offered by the Social Exchange Theory ( Blau, 1964 ). According to this theory, volunteers decide to join an NPO assessing the cost-benefit balance due to their involvement in the NPO's tasks. It is likely that the higher the benefits perceived as a result of their work, the longer the commitment in the volunteering activity ( Blau, 1964 ).

Apart from theoretical underpinnings, some authors pointed out that volunteering is a long-term planned behavior, within a dynamic process where various factors intervene ( Omoto and Snyder, 1995 ; Penner, 2004 ). Thus, over time, the variables that come into play in leading someone to become a volunteer tend to change or take on a different weight from those that determined the initial choice. The shift from the initial motivations is somehow inevitable: after the first phase defined as “honeymoon,” where the volunteer is full of enthusiasm and desire to be engaged in the activities, a new phase takes place, connotated by a more realistic knowledge of the organization, based on the direct experience developed within the organization itself. The “post-honeymoon” phase necessarily bears feelings of disillusionment, since the idealization of the first months is replaced by the awareness of the critical aspects of the organization ( Wymer and Starnes, 2001 ).

In this second phase, it may happen that the benefits and rewards obtained by volunteering may not be sufficient to compensate for their costs in terms of time, money, and personal resources required to perform the voluntary work. Thus, this new understanding carries the risk of leading the volunteer to leave the organization, if the critical factors are not counterbalanced by other positive factors generated by the actual experiences of volunteering ( McCurley and Lynch, 1996 ).

In other words, the actual experience of volunteering changes the initial motivations of the volunteers ( Snyder et al., 1999 ), either positively or negatively. These modifications indicate that the leadership of NPOs plays a pivotal role in providing support to the volunteers' choice to stay, shaping their experiences through effective managerial practices and choices ( Umezurike, 2011 ; Senses-Ozyurt and Villicana-Reyna, 2016 ; Benevene et al., 2018 ). NPOs' leaders are, in fact, in charge of molding the operational activities of every volunteer; they hold responsibility for providing volunteers with positive organizational activities and experiences, which may compensate for the negative factors associated with volunteering.

Leadership Style and Its Impact on Volunteers' Outcomes (Satisfaction and Commitment)

The knowledge about the impact of leadership styles on volunteers' behaviors is still far away from being fully explored. Whereas, on the one hand, it is well-known in the literature that NPOs' positive leadership is linked with sustained volunteering ( Catano et al., 2001 ; Avolio et al., 2004 ; Richardson and Vandenberg, 2005 ; Rowold and Rohmann, 2009 ; Senses-Ozyurt and Villicana-Reyna, 2016 ; Yahaya and Ebrahim, 2016 ). on the other hand, many of the studies carried out on the outcomes of leadership styles on the members of NPO did not make a distinction between paid staff and volunteers ( Allen et al., 2018 ; Einolf, 2018 ; Li, 2019 ; Peng et al., 2020 ).

This is an important gap to fill, since the motivations of volunteers are different from those of paid staff, and the management of volunteers must be tailored to their needs and motivations.

Studies carried out among NPOs have proven that the quality of the leadership is a critical factor for the volunteers' satisfaction and commitment, which, in turn, affects their turnover, intention to stay, performance, and well-being ( Catano et al., 2001 ; Avolio et al., 2004 ; Richardson and Vandenberg, 2005 ; Senses-Ozyurt and Villicana-Reyna, 2016 ; Yahaya and Ebrahim, 2016 ).

Among the relative paucity of studies on the impact of leadership styles on satisfaction and commitment of volunteers, the most explored construct is transformational leadership. Transformational leaders inspire and motivate their followers to look beyond self-interest and to work together to pursue a collective purpose ( Burns, 1998 ). An early study by Catano et al. (2001) found out that transformational leadership was associated with volunteers' commitment to the organization as well as their will to stay in the organization. Later, Dwyer et al. (2013) showed that transformational leadership influences volunteer satisfaction. These findings were partially confirmed by Schneider and George (2011) , in a study carried out among volunteers, where transformational leadership did not appear to predict commitment. However, it showed significant positive correlations with satisfaction and intention to stay, through the respectively partial or full mediation of empowerment. On the other hand, the same study highlighted that servant leadership, connoted by ethical behavior and concern for subordinates, was associated with member satisfaction, commitment, and intention to stay in the same NPO, through the full mediation of empowerment ( Schneider and George, 2011 ; Greenleaf, 2019 ).

Servant leadership emerged as positively correlated with volunteers' satisfaction and organizational commitment, also in a study by Erdurmazli (2019) . Oostlander et al. (2014) considered the autonomy-supportive leadership, characterized by the understanding and the acknowledgment of volunteers' perspectives, giving them opportunities for choice, supporting their individuals' competences, and encouraging personal initiative ( Deci et al., 2001 ; Gagné and Deci, 2005 ). Their study concluded that volunteer satisfaction and motivation is positively linked with this type of leadership. More recently, a study carried out by Benevene et al. (2018) observed the impact of ethical leadership on volunteers. Ethical leadership is defined as “the demonstration of normatively appropriate conduct through personal actions and interpersonal relationships and the promotion of such conduct through two-way communication” ( Brown et al., 2005 , p.120). This study showed that ethical leadership is connected with job satisfaction and organizational commitment among volunteers and that these factors have a positive impact on volunteers' intention to keep serving in the same NPOs in the long run.

Another recent study considered two dimensions of the Key Leadership Behaviors, which refer to inclusive and shared leadership, able to generate a culture of compassion toward the members of their organization, as well as toward the beneficiaries and end-users of their services ( The King's Fund, 2017 ). This instrument is composed of the sub-scales or dimensions (Create a sense of collective identity; Create direction and alignment around strategies and objectives; Develop and empower people; Enable collective learning; Encourage trust and cooperation; Ensure necessary resources are available; Helping to interpret the meaning of events; Nurture commitment and optimism; Organize and coordinate work efforts; Promote social justice and morality). The Key Leadership Behaviors is focused on actual behaviors utilized by leaders, rather than on the perceptions of the members of organizations, thus contributing to the understanding of the leadership process.

Evidence from a study carried out among a group of Italian volunteers that considered two dimensions of this instrument (i.e., “Creating a sense of collective identity” and “Encouraging trust and cooperation”), showed that they are positively associated with work engagement, which, in turn, is positively related to volunteer satisfaction. The relationships between the two dimensions considered and volunteer satisfaction were found to be fully mediated by work engagement and to have an impact on volunteers' intentions to stay in the same organization ( Dal Corso et al., 2019 ). These results seem promising.

In fact, the Key Leadership Behaviors were originally developed to be administered among healthcare systems, that is, among members of organizations offering people-oriented service. Therefore, it is possible to suppose that this instrument might be particularly suitable in offering interesting insights on the relationship between NPOs' leaders and volunteers involved in social services. It has to be stressed, in fact, that none of the leadership scale was developed to be administered among volunteers, but rather to paid staff.

Thus, in the present study two other dimensions of the Key Leadership Behaviors were taken into consideration, namely: “Helping people to grow and lead” and “Enabling learning and innovation,” “Helping people to grow and lead” refers to the construct of the empowering leadership, so that empowered followers can fully respond to a shared leadership. According to the Key Leadership Behavior, empowering leaders foster autonomy and build self-confidence and personal growth of their followers, in line with Menon's definition of empowerment ( Menon, 1999 , p.161), which is a “cognitive state characterized by a sense of perceived control, competence, and goal internalization.” Empowerment has emerged among both for-profit and non-profit organizations to play a relevant role in determining positive outcomes: empowered members of organizations report greater self-efficacy, which, in turn, fosters higher levels of satisfaction, commitment, effectiveness, and high performance ( Kark et al., 2003 ). According to Spreitzer and Sonenshein (2004) , empowerment involves values related to work goals, sense competence and autonomy, and perceived impact on organizational outcomes by means of one's own actions. Thus, empowerment correlates significantly with satisfaction with the activities performed, affective commitment, job satisfaction, and improved performance both among paid staff and volunteers ( Galindo-Kuhn and Guzley, 2001 ; Choi et al., 2016 ). Nonetheless, the effects of a leadership able to empower volunteers are still poorly explored ( Schneider and George, 2011 ). The relevance of this subscale of the Key Leadership Behaviors for volunteers can be grounded theoretically on the function of enhancement, according to the functional approach of Clary et al. (1998) . Empowering leaders, in fact, may offer the opportunity of personal development ( Anderson and Moore, 1978 ) and satisfaction related to personal growth and self-esteem ( Jenner, 1982 ) through volunteering.

The other dimension considered, “Enabling learning and innovation,” refers to the involvement of each member of the organization in continuous learning, sharing, and generating new organizational knowledge, in order to reach better performance and higher quality services.

The relevance of the dimension “Enabling learning and innovation” refers to the function of understanding, according to the functional approach of Clary and colleagues ( Clary et al., 1998 ; Clary and Snyder, 1999 ). Leaders who promote reflexivity and the sharing of individual knowledge also promote a deeper understanding of the problems that volunteers are dealing with through their actions, a better knowledge of the social environment where they operate and intervene, as well as sustaining their motivation to keep on volunteering.

Learning and skills development are common benefits of volunteering ( Green and Chalip, 2009 ; Viel-Ruma et al., 2010 ), but, to the authors' knowledge, the issue of a leadership style promoting learning has been scarcely addressed in the context of volunteering. More precisely, Wisner et al. (2005) found that a very strong predictor of sustained volunteering is encouraging volunteers to reflect and learn on their work since this is a “way to help volunteers make sense of their experiences—both positive and negative—as they help to accomplish the organization's mission” ( Wisner et al., 2005 , p. 148). As Einolf (2018, p.159) points out, reflecting and learning “provides volunteers with an opportunity to think consciously about their experiences with others, to examine their own values and beliefs and to develop problem-solving skills.”

Satisfaction and Organizational Commitment as Key Factors of Volunteers' Management

Studies on the outcome of effective leadership on volunteers' retainment, performance, and well-being took into consideration mainly two main constructs: satisfaction with the activities performed, and organizational commitment ( Einolf, 2018 ).

This approach replicated the previous studies carried out in the managerial field, which have proven the strong link between organizational commitment and job satisfaction which, in turn, are highly associated with reduced absenteeism, low intention to quit, work effort and higher performance ( Meyer et al., 2002 ; Park and Kim, 2009 ; Vecina et al., 2012 ).

As far as organizational commitment is concerned, Allen and Meyer (1990) developed a Three-Component Model composed of: affective commitment (referring to an emotional attachment to, identification with, and involvement in the organization); continuance commitment (referring to the perceived costs associated with leaving the organization); and normative commitment (referring to the perceived obligation to remain in the organization) ( Meyer et al., 2002 , 2006 ). Despite the fact that this concept was initially conceived to be used in the for-profit milieu, many of the studies carried out among NPOs observed organizational commitment, especially the facet of affective commitment when approaching both paid staff and volunteers or just volunteers. This dimension, in fact, is possibly considered the most effective in capturing the strength of the relationship between the volunteers and their organization ( Stephens et al., 2004 ; Bang et al., 2013 ; Rodell et al., 2017 ; Ward and Greene, 2018 ). Thus, we aimed to verify the following hypotheses:

H1: Leaders' actions aimed at developing and empowering volunteers influence volunteer affective commitment;

H2: Leaders' actions aimed at enabling learning and innovation in volunteers influence volunteer affective commitment.

With regard to job satisfaction, this construct represents the extent to which people like or dislike their job ( Spector, 1997 ). It has to do with how people feel about their job, the combination of positive or negative feelings that workers have toward their work. It is described as a set of beliefs and affects related to the daily work experience ( Mowday et al., 1979 ). Similar studies on volunteers' affective commitment, as well as studies on employees and volunteers showed the strong relationship between satisfaction for the activities performed in one's own organization and intention to stay ( Wisner et al., 2005 ; Vecina et al., 2009 ; Garner and Garner, 2011 ; Waters and Bortree, 2012 ; Nencini et al., 2016 ; Okun et al., 2016 ).

However, as Vecina et al. (2009) noted, the construct of job satisfaction as it is used among for-profit organizations or paid staff does not fit well with volunteers. Volunteer satisfaction is not merely the evaluation of how individuals feel about their organizational role, as for job satisfaction among paid workers ( Spector, 1985 ). Unlike paid staff, volunteers do not find their satisfaction for the activities performed in career advancements, monetary recognition or benefits, or recognition of their professional skills. On the contrary, volunteers' satisfaction is a combination of several beliefs and affects the volunteer feels toward the NPO. Such beliefs include the extent to which the volunteering experience is consistent with personal values, whether their volunteering activities are perceived as useful, and whether they feel recognized and valued by the NPO.

Thus, Vecina et al. (2009 , 2012) developed the Volunteer Satisfaction Index, identifying three peculiar facets in volunteer satisfaction: (1) satisfaction with their motivation to volunteer, (2) satisfaction with the tasks performed, and (3) satisfaction with the management of the NPO in which the volunteer operates. Their studies confirmed the association between volunteers' satisfaction and intention to stay as volunteers ( Vecina et al., 2009 , 2012 ). For the purpose of this study, the Volunteers Satisfaction Index was used., in order to verify the following hypotheses:

H3a: Leaders' actions aimed at developing and empowering volunteers are linked to volunteer satisfaction;

H3b: Leaders' actions aimed at enabling learning and innovation in volunteers are linked to volunteer satisfaction.

The Mediating Role of Volunteer Satisfaction

Satisfaction and affective commitment of volunteers are both related to their well-being, performance, and intention to stay. However, while satisfaction is more determinant for newer volunteers, affective commitment is more crucial for veteran volunteers ( Chacón et al., 2007 ; Vecina et al., 2012 ). This happens because volunteers' satisfaction is more linked to the first phase of the actual experience within the organization, and more subject to change, while affective commitment is built over time and tends to be more stable, being built over a more factual knowledge of the NPOs where volunteers operate ( Mowday et al., 1979 ; Jiménez et al., 2010 ). In fact, the primary difference between these constructs relies on the stability of beliefs and affects related to them. Thus, somehow, satisfaction acts as a precursor of affective commitment in the volunteering experience, which, in turn, promotes sustained volunteerism ( Chacón et al., 2007 ). Satisfied volunteers have higher chances to become more committed to the NPO over time ( Jiménez et al., 2010 ; Cady et al., 2018 ). It seems, indeed, that satisfaction for the volunteering experience protects volunteers from the strain occurring from their activities and, at the same time, enhances the affective commitment toward the organization's mission and objectives, when a more realistic knowledge of their organization has been developed ( Chacón et al., 2007 ).

Consequently, the authors also developed the following hypothesis:

H4: Volunteer satisfaction is linked to volunteer affective commitment.

Since volunteers' satisfaction is positively associated with their affective commitment, and both are linked with sustained volunteerism, effective NPO management needs to endorse leadership styles and strategies that generate volunteer satisfaction and affective commitment. This link is a crucial factor in guaranteeing the quality and the sustainability of their organization's activities.

Based on the functional theory of Clary et al. (1998) and Clary and Snyder (1999) it is possible to hypothesize that leaders who promote learning and understanding among those who freely devote their time and energies in the NPOs' activities, as well as leaders who are able to empower and support individual growth, are likely to offer a proper answer to the volunteers' needs and expectations, thus responding to the drives that push them toward volunteering ( Chacón et al., 2007 ; Jiménez et al., 2010 ). The satisfaction with the volunteers' personal motivations to volunteer, together with the satisfaction with the tasks performed and with the management of the NPO, would lead to greater volunteer satisfaction and, in turn, would generate affective commitment.

Thus, the following hypotheses were developed:

H5a: Volunteer satisfaction mediates the relationship between leaders' actions aimed at developing and empowering volunteers and volunteer commitment

H5b: Volunteer satisfaction mediates the relationship between leaders' actions aimed at enabling learning and innovation and volunteer commitment.

Key Contributions of This Study

This work aims to partially fulfill the gap regarding the role of leadership behaviors on volunteer retention. More specifically, building on the theoretical framework of the three-stage model of volunteers' duration of service ( Chacón et al., 2007 ), this work aims to deepen the knowledge on the relationship between two leadership behaviors with the constructs tackling the first two stages of Chacon and colleagues' model, namely volunteer satisfaction and commitment. Furthermore, such a model would allow testing some aspects of the functional approach to volunteerism ( Clary et al., 1992 , 1998 ), namely enhancement and understanding.

Overall, the proposed model, shown in Figure 1 , verifies the mediating role of volunteer satisfaction in the relationship between leadership behaviors, namely actions oriented toward the enablement of learning and innovation and actions oriented toward the growth and empowerment of volunteers, and the volunteer commitment.

Figure 1 . Theoretical model.

Materials and Methods

Participants and procedure.

Two hundred and twenty-four volunteers in health and social service-related NPOs (52.2% female) from Central and Northern Italy took part in this study. Their ages ranged from 14 to 76 ( M = 38.42 years, SD = 16.24). Regarding educational level, 39.5% of participants have a high school degree, 31.2% an elementary or junior high school degree, 22.1% a graduate degree, and 7.2% a post-graduate degree. Regarding their occupational status, 26.2% were students, 22.1% employees, 12.8% freelancers, 12.4% retirees, 9.2% homemakers, 8.2% unemployed, 5.1% workmen, 1.5% teachers, 1.5% executives, and 0.5% merchants. Finally, regarding the duration of their service as volunteers, most of the participants (69.7%) had been a volunteer for one year or more, 19% for 6–12 months, 11.3% for <6 months. The participant volunteers constitute a convenience sample, not representative of the entire population of Italian volunteers.

Data were gathered by the research group at the end of NPOs board meetings. More specifically, by the end of the meeting a brief presentation of the research and its scope was given by one of the researchers, with the aim of informing the volunteers about the chance to take part, anonymously and voluntarily, in this study. All the volunteers willing to participate in the research were administered a copy of the protocol in an individual setting. This sampling strategy could have excluded volunteers not participating in the meeting during the established dates. At the same time, the authors preferred a one-day gathering to avoid the use of mixed gathering method (e.g., paper-pencil and online data gathering), or the influence of concomitant events between eventual multiple gathering sessions. The entire process was anonymous. Participants took part in the study after having received written information on Italian privacy regulations and having signed informed consent. The presentation of the study from an independent research group (and not from a NPO manager or employee), the provision of an individual setting to complete the protocol, and the anonymity and confidentiality of the procedures regarding data gathering and informed consent signing were the measures implemented to address a potential social desirability bias.

The research was conducted following the APA's ethical principles and code of conduct ( APA, 2017 ). When an Italian validation was not available, the original versions of questionnaires were initially translated from English or Spanish into Italian and then back-translated into English or Spanish to check the alignment with the original versions.

In order to assess the constructs under investigation, we used the following measures. Helping people to grow and lead and enabling learning and innovation variables were assessed with eleven items taken from Key Leadership Behaviors—The King's Fund Cultural Leadership Programme ( The King's Fund, 2017 ). Each item was measured on a 5-point Likert scale ranging from 1 (strongly disagree) to 5 (strongly agree). The Cronbach's alpha is 0.89 for helping people to grow and lead and 0.88 for enabling learning and innovation. Sample items for the helping people to grow and lead scale (five total items) are: “(S)he supports the growth and development of team members”; “(S)he empowers team members to do the work in the way they think best”; “(S)he helps us to believe in ourselves to rise to new challenges.” Sample items for the Enabling learning and innovation scale (six total items) are: “(S) he motivates us to keep learning about ways of improving our services; “(S)he ensures we regularly take time to think through ways to improve our work”; “(S) he encourages us to reflect on what we can learn from times when work goes well.”

Volunteer satisfaction was assessed with the Volunteer Satisfaction Index ( Vecina et al., 2009 ). The scale has 18 items, measured on a ten-point Likert scale ranged from 1 (I totally disagree) to 10 (I totally agree). The items are combined to provide three subscales: satisfaction with methods, satisfaction with tasks, and satisfaction with organizational management. The Cronbach's alpha for all the items is 0.90. Sample items are: “My volunteering allows me to express my personal values,” “The tasks that I perform are very useful.”

Affective commitment was assessed with six items from the Organizational Commitment Scale ( Allen and Meyer, 1990 ). Each was measured on a 7-point Likert Scale, ranging from 1 (I totally disagree) to 7 (I totally agree). The Cronbach's alpha is 0.92. Sample items are: “I really feel like that's the organization's problems” (reverse-scored), “I enjoy discussing my organization with people outside it.”

Data Analysis

First, a Confirmatory Factor Analysis (CFA) ( Kline, 2011 ) was performed in order to examine the measurement model with MPlus version 8 ( Muthén and Muthén, 2017 ). To enhance the reliability and parsimony of our model, item parcels were created for ‘Helping people to grow and lead' and “Enabling learning and innovation” (10 items) and “Affective Commitment” (six items). Each factor was defined by two parcels, to obtain fewer free parameters to estimate and to reduce the sources of sampling error ( Little et al., 2002 , 2013 ; Coffman and MacCallum, 2005 ), and each parcel was created by sequentially summing items assigned based on the highest to lowest item-total corrected correlations ( Little et al., 2002 , 2013 ; Coffman and MacCallum, 2005 ). The Robust Maximum Likelihood Approach (MLR) was used to deal with non-normality in data ( Wang and Wang, 2012 ).

Next, the structural model (Model 1) was tested by using the structural equation modeling (SEM) approach ( Kline, 2011 ). The model was conceptualized by using “Helping people to grow and lead” and “Enabling learning and innovation” (as measured by Key Leadership Behavior), “Volunteer satisfaction” (as measured by the Volunteer Satisfaction Index, as satisfaction with methods, tasks, and organizational management), and affective commitment (as measured by the Organizational Commitment Scale). We hypothesized both direct and indirect (through volunteer satisfaction) effects of “Helping people to grow and lead” and “Enabling learning and innovation” on affective commitment.

According to a multi-faceted approach to the assessment of the fit of the model ( Tanaka, 1993 ), the following indices were used to evaluate the goodness-of-fit: the Chi-square likelihood ratio statistic, the Tucker and Lewis Index (TLI), the Comparative Fit Index (CFI), the Root Mean Square Error of Approximation (RMSEA), with its confidence intervals, and the Standardized Root Mean Square Residual (SRMR). We accepted TLI and CFI values >0.95 ( Hu and Bentler, 1998 ), RMSEA values lower than 0.08 ( Browne and Cudeck, 1992 ; Hooper et al., 2008 ) and SRMR values lower than 0.08 ( Hu and Bentler, 1998 ; Hooper et al., 2008 ).

The following procedures of data exploration were applied: (a) uni- and multivariate outlier analysis (Mahalanobis's distance was set to p < 0.001) ( Gath and Hayes, 2006 ); (b) score distribution analysis (skewness and kurtosis cut-off points were set to [−2; +2] ( George and Mallery, 2003 ); (c) missing value analyses (missing values were skipped listwise) ( Little, 1992 ). At the end of these procedures, we obtained the sample described above.

Measurement Model

The measurement model showed a good fit to the data: χ ( 28 ) 2 = 29.882, p = 0.094, CFI = 0.983, TLI = 0.990, RMSEA = 0.043 (90% CI = 0.000–0.076, p = 0.588), SRMR = 0.037, confirming validity and distinguishability of the four theoretical constructs. The means, standard deviations, and correlations among the studied variables are presented in Table 1 . As expected, affective commitment was associated with both Helping people to grow and lead ( r = 0.444, p = 0.000) and Enabling learning and innovation ( r = 0.475, p = 0.000), as well as to volunteer satisfaction ( r = 0.496, p = 0.000). At the same time, volunteer satisfaction was correlated with Helping people to grow and lead ( r = 0.474, p = 0.000) and Enabling learning and innovation ( r = 0.481, p = 0.000). Socio-demographic and volunteering-related variables are not shown, as their associations with the variables of interest are not significant.

Table 1 . Means, Standard deviations and Correlations among leader actions, volunteer satisfaction and volunteer commitment.

Final Model

Model 1 ( Figure 2 ), hypothesizing both direct and indirect (through volunteer satisfaction) effects of Helping people to grow and lead and Enabling learning and innovation on affective commitment, proved to be an adequate fit to the data: χ ( 28 ) 2 = 29.882, p = 0.094, CFI = 0.983, TLI = 0.990, RMSEA = 0.043 (90% CI = 0.000–0.076, p = 0.588), SRMR = 0.037. Overall, Enabling learning and innovation was associated with Volunteer Satisfaction ( b = 0.38, p = 0.010), but not with affective commitment ( p = ns). Furthermore, Helping people to grow and lead did not show significant associations, neither with Volunteer satisfaction, nor with Affective Commitment. Finally, Volunteer satisfaction showed a significant direct effect on Affective commitment ( b = 0.36, p = 0.000). The percentages of variance explained were 27.8% for volunteer satisfaction and 38.9% for affective commitment. Helping people to grow and lead and Enabling learning and innovation are significantly associated ( b = 0.84, p = 0.001).

Figure 2 . Final model. Standardized direct effects were reported. ** = p ≤ 0.01, n.s. = not significant.

Volunteer satisfaction fully mediated the effect of Enabling learning and innovation on affective commitment ( b DIRECT = ns, b INDIRECT = 0.14, p = 0.022; total indirect effect = 0.42, p = 0.016); Hayes (2013) . At the same time, Helping people to grow and lead had no direct, nor indirect, significant effect on Affective commitment.

Managing volunteers is recognized as one of the most challenging tasks of NPOs' leadership, in the light of the high turnover rates of volunteers. At the same time, leadership style is a pivotal factor in volunteers' retention, productivity, and well-being ( Garner and Garner, 2011 ). In fact, NPOs' leaders shape not only the organizational activities but also volunteers' behaviors through their actions, choices, and communication ( Schneider and George, 2011 ). NPO leadership is responsible for keeping up volunteers' satisfaction and commitment, which are strong antecedents of volunteers' retention, performance, and well-being. Our findings suggested an involvement of leaders' actions oriented toward learning and innovation, but not of those oriented toward volunteers' growth and empowerment, in enhancing volunteers' satisfaction and commitment. Further sections will detail the theoretical and practical contribution of these results.

Links With Previous Literature and Theoretical Contributions

Our study aimed at deepening the understanding of the association of leadership style with volunteer satisfaction and affective commitment, since these two constructs are linked to sustained volunteerism ( Chacón et al., 2007 ). Thus, the objective of the present study was to observe how two subscales of the Key Leadership Behaviors (namely: “Helping people to grow and lead” and “Enabling learning and innovation”) are positively associated with volunteer satisfaction and affective commitment.

Research findings showed that leaders' actions oriented toward the enablement of learning and innovation have an effect on volunteer affective commitment, through the full mediation of volunteer satisfaction. Leaders' actions oriented toward the growth and empowerment of volunteers, instead, did not show significant relationships with volunteer satisfaction and volunteer affective commitment.

More precisely, our findings provided support for H3b (Leaders' actions aimed at enabling learning and innovation in volunteers are linked to volunteer satisfaction). These findings are in line with previous studies carried out almost exclusively in the for-profit organizations, showing a positive association between leaders' actions oriented at supporting collective learning and followers' satisfaction ( Chang and Lee, 2007 ; Dirani, 2009 ; Bess et al., 2011 ; Razali et al., 2013 ; Dekoulou and Trivellas, 2015 ). These results might also be read in the light of the fact that volunteers do not often make full use of their professional skills to carry out their activities. Instead, they are urged to develop new skills through their direct volunteering experiences, such as team working, or communication or emotional regulation, just to mention a few of them. Thus, the development of new abilities and competencies might, at least in part, explain the positive association of volunteers' learning with their satisfaction. Again, this effect is theoretically explained by the function of understanding, according to the functional theory ( Clary et al., 1998 ).

Similarly, H4 (Volunteer satisfaction is linked to volunteer affective commitment) and H5b (Volunteer satisfaction mediates the relationship between leaders' actions aimed at enabling learning and innovation and volunteer commitment) were also confirmed. The positive association of volunteers' satisfaction and their affective commitment, as well as the mediating role played by volunteer satisfaction in the relationship between positive behaviors and actions of the leadership on the one hand, and affective commitment on the other, are consistent with previous literature carried out among volunteers ( Vecina et al., 2009 ; Benevene et al., 2018 ; Dal Corso et al., 2019 ). The results about the positive effects of leadership, enabling followers' collective learning and innovation on their affective commitment and satisfaction, are quite promising.

This finding deserves further attention, since creating workplace learning has proven to influence not only job satisfaction ( Rowden and Conine, 2005 ; Iliopoulos et al., 2018 ; Ryu and Moon, 2019 ), but also job performance ( Judge et al., 2001 ) and knowledge generation ( de Grip, 2015 ). Promoting learning among the members became a strategic issue in the management of organizations since 1990 ( Senge, 1991 ). According to Senge, an effective leader is required to be able to foster collective learning by catalyzing the whole organization around learning, rather than on the individual members ( Senge, 1991 , 2006 ). Being able to learn constantly has become a crucial factor of all organizations, private and governmental, for-profit, and non-profit, since this factor allows an organization to survive and grow, as well as to be able to cope with the challenges of a continuously changing environment. Learning is necessary to improve the services provided, to cope with new needs and new challenges, through a bottom-up approach. However, organization learning always starts from individual learning through critically re-thinking the activities performed, and then socializing the individual knowledge developed. In this way the knowledge of each member of an organization may be turned into organizational knowledge, according to the theory of the spiral of knowledge ( Nonaka, 1991 ). The new knowledge may then be turned into innovation and improved service. Thus, the more the leader fosters organizational learning, the higher the organizational adaptability to community requests ( Heifetz and Laurie, 1997 ; Kouzes and Posner, 2007 ). NPOs' leadership holds responsibility over promoting and sustaining this process, which has a two-fold outcome: volunteers' satisfaction which, in turn, is associated with affective commitments and higher organizational performance. In spite of the fact that this leadership dimension has been poorly observed before among volunteers and empirical data is by far scarce, this could be an interesting avenue for further study that would anchor leaders who operates in the direction of collective learning and volunteers' outcomes.

H2 (Leaders' actions aimed at enabling learning and innovation in volunteers influence volunteer affective commitment) was not confirmed, since our findings show no direct association of the dimension of leadership “Enabling learning and innovation” with the affective commitment of volunteers. Results from previous studies, carried out until now only among non-profit organizations and dealing with the relationship between learning and organizational commitment, are not always consistent. Several studies carried out also in non-Western countries proved the impact of learning on organizational commitment ( Rose et al., 2009 ; Budihardjo, 2013 ; Lau et al., 2017 ). For instance, Jerez-Gómez et al. (2005 ) found out that learning behaviors increase organizational citizenship behaviors, job performance, job satisfaction, organizational commitment, belief in information, goal commitment, satisfaction with the leader, and low intentions to quit. Similarly, Kamali et al. (2017) pointed out a positive and direct relationship between organizational learning and organizational commitment of staff. Conversely, Suifan and Allouzi (2018) found no direct effect of staff learning on affective commitment.

Nonetheless, the association of leadership enabling collective learning ad innovation with affective commitment through the full mediation of job satisfaction might be read in the light of the “Three-stage model of volunteers' duration,” developed by Chacón et al. (2007 ). According to this model, sustained volunteering goes through different phases: the first one is the satisfaction with the initial motivations, the second one is the commitment with the organization they serve, and the third one is the role identification as volunteers. Thus, our findings seem to suggest the key role played by volunteers' satisfaction in generating their affective commitment, at least in the relationship between leadership enabling collective learning and innovation on one side, and affective commitment on the other.

Like H2, also H1 (Leaders' actions aimed at developing and empowering volunteers influence volunteer affective commitment), H3 (Leaders' actions aimed at developing and empowering volunteers are linked to volunteer satisfaction) and H5a (Volunteer satisfaction mediates the relationship between leaders' actions aimed at developing and empowering volunteers and volunteer commitment) were not confirmed by our study. To the authors' knowledge, this study is the first dealing with the effect of empowering leadership on volunteers' affective commitment and satisfaction. A number of studies carried out among for-profit and public organizations showed the positive association between this leadership style on the two considered variables, as well as on work engagement and psychological empowerment ( Vecchio et al., 2010 ; Hassan et al., 2013 ; Amundsen and Martinsen, 2015 ; Kim et al., 2018 ; Kim and Beehr, 2020 ).

Interestingly, some studies showed the effects of empowering leadership on job satisfaction through either the full or partial mediation of other factors, such as the psychological empowerment (which refers to the perception of being empowered, through the dimensions of meaningfulness of the activities performed, competence, self-determination, and impact of one's own work) or the leader-member exchange relations ( Albrecht and Andreetta, 2011 ; Hassan et al., 2013 ; Amundsen and Martinsen, 2015 ).

It might be hypothesized, then, that empowerment operates on job satisfaction through the mediation of other factors. Therefore, in the future, it would be interesting to explore the mediating role of psychological empowerment between the empowering leadership and volunteers' satisfaction or affective commitment. In other words, empowering leaders might not have an effect on the satisfaction and commitment of their followers if these do not perceive their own empowerment.

Another explanation for the lack of positive association of empowering leadership with volunteers' satisfaction and affective commitment might arise from a couple of previous studies carried out among volunteers, which proved that empowering leadership is positively associated with volunteers' engagement ( Tuckey et al., 2013 ; Kang, 2016 ). From these studies, it emerged that empowering leadership develops volunteers' engagement through the improvement of their working conditions. In fact, according to Tuckey et al. (2013 , p. 23) “empowering leadership optimized the combination of cognitive job demands and cognitive job resources for followers to achieve at work (a form of extrinsic motivation) and feel fulfilled (a form of intrinsic motivation). Thus, leaders who empowered their followers … created better working conditions for workers. The end result was an increase in engagement.”

These findings suggest that empowerment leadership has an effect on volunteers, generating positive feelings about their activities-related issues, and counteracting the effect of negative emotions, such as emotional exhaustion and cynicism. Empowering leadership may then promote positive work emotions among their followers, helping them to foster their personal resources. This means that empowering leadership has definitely a relationship with the positive feelings of volunteers about how they perceive their activities, while it might not be directly associated with the volunteers' satisfaction (that is: with their motivation to volunteering, or the tasks performed, or with the NPO in which the volunteer operates) or with their affective commitment with their organization.

The relationship between empowering leadership and affective commitment of volunteers is worthy of future research, since other leadership styles showed different results. Ethical leadership, for instance, has proven to be positively associated with volunteer affective commitment both directly and partially through the full mediation of volunteer satisfaction. From the study carried out by Schneider and George (2011) , transformational leadership did not significantly predict affective commitment, unlike the findings of Erdurmazli (2019) on the relationship between servant leadership and affective and normative commitment.

Moreover, a further point has to be stressed: the study developed by Dal Corso et al. (2019) found out that two other dimensions of the Key Leadership Behaviors (namely: “Creating a sense of collective identity” and “Encouraging trust and cooperation”) are positively associated with job satisfaction, but through the full mediation of work engagement. On the other hand, our study on two other dimensions of the same instrument showed different results.

This is an interesting point to address, also in the light of the previous different results reached by studies that observed other types of leadership in their outcomes on volunteers. It might be hypothesized that some types or some dimensions of a specific leadership style could better suit volunteers than others ( Spears, 1998 ; Erdurmazli, 2019 ). It could also be hypothesized that culture and contingencies might exert a role in determining the relationship between leadership style and volunteers' satisfaction and affective commitment or, more generally, with volunteers' outcomes. For these reasons, it would be worth to develop multilevel and cross-cultural studies. The volunteers reached by this study were all working in delivering social services. Perhaps other volunteers, committed with other tasks and volunteer environment (such as in a library or with firefighters), might show different outcomes ( Waters and Bortree, 2012 ; Henderson and Sowa, 2018 ; Oh, 2019 ).

Practical Implications

This work has interesting implications for NPO management. It shows the relevance of making NPOs' managers aware of their leadership style in retaining volunteers and promoting their well-being. First of all, this study shows the value of learning practices for volunteers. Having the opportunity to learn new things is one of the motivations for volunteering ( Clary et al., 1998 ; Clary and Snyder, 1999 ), as well as one of the main benefits of being a volunteer ( Green and Chalip, 2009 ; Viel-Ruma et al., 2010 ). Our findings show the importance of giving value to organizational learning processes, in terms of impact on volunteer satisfaction and commitment and, likely, on their retention. In order to achieve such outcomes, NPO managers should give more value to formal and informal knowledge creation and management processes. At the same time, the manager should be actively involved in the enablement of such practices, for example, by encouraging the team to assess and review practices, structures, and working styles, or implementing regular meetings aimed at improving the work. Overall, higher volunteer satisfaction, commitment, and retention would allow the NPO to perform better.

Secondly, it is interesting to note that volunteer satisfaction fully mediates the effect of promoting organizational learning. This implies that NPO managers should address volunteers' motivations and subsequent satisfaction levels, in order to verify whether and how the organization could contribute to improving them. Previous studies showed that when managers address efficaciously volunteer motivations, their volunteers are more likely to be highly satisfied with their work in the NPO ( Schneider and George, 2011 ; Dwyer et al., 2013 ; Oostlander et al., 2014 ).

Thirdly, a number of studies addressed how personality traits may influence the decision to volunteer but, from a strictly managerial point of view, it is more productive to dwell on the organizational and managerial aspects than on dispositional or personality traits of volunteers since the former are the more directly controllable by the organization. In fact, the analysis of personality and dispositional traits could undoubtedly constitute a factor to be evaluated in the selection phase of new volunteers. However, very few organizations can afford to discard any volunteers based on their mismatch between these traits and organizational aspects ( Elshaug and Metzer, 2001 ; Pushkar et al., 2002 ; Li et al., 2007 ; Van Vianen et al., 2008 ).

Limitations

Firstly, this study is based on correlational data. Longitudinal, as well as qualitative, studies would allow researchers to better understand to what extent leaders supporting individual and collective needs promote volunteer satisfaction and engagement. Furthermore, considering the concerns regarding the existence of common method bias, and despite applying some suggestions from Conway and Lance (2010) (e.g., preservation of anonymity, removal of unengaged/outlier responses, testing each scale reliability and the general measurement model), we were unable to provide a multi-informant source for our data.

Secondly, some studies ( Haivas et al., 2012 ; Oostlander et al., 2014 ) shed light on the chance that the collective dimensions of volunteering could not be as salient as shown in this paper or in the cited researches ( Boezeman and Ellemers, 2009 ). More research is needed to clarify better the role of group and collectivity in the volunteering experience. More specifically, it could be useful to study specific kinds of NPOs and verify which leaders' actions are more valued by volunteers, according to NPOs' tasks and objectives. For example, it is plausible that NPOs oriented toward psychological assistance (e.g., helplines) could require more competence and a higher sense of empowerment and skills growth in volunteers when compared to less helping-oriented organizations.

Data Availability Statement

The datasets for this article are not publicly available because of local legal and privacy restrictions (Italian Data Protection Code—Legislative Decree No. 196/2003). Requests to access the datasets should be directed to Paula Benevene, benevene@lumsa.it .

Ethics Statement

Ethical review and approval was not required for the study on human participants in accordance with the local legislation and institutional requirements. The patients/participants provided their written informed consent to participate in this study.

Author Contributions

PB, IB, and MW developed the research project and collected the data. IB conducted the analyses. PB and IB wrote the first draft of the paper. MW reviewed the paper. All authors contributed to the article and approved the submitted version.

This work was supported by LUMSA University to PB.

Conflict of Interest

The authors declare that the research was conducted in the absence of any commercial or financial relationships that could be construed as a potential conflict of interest.

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Keywords: leadership, volunteer satisfaction, affective commitment, organizational learning, non-profit management, non-profit

Citation: Benevene P, Buonomo I and West M (2020) The Relationship Between Leadership Behaviors and Volunteer Commitment: The Role of Volunteer Satisfaction. Front. Psychol. 11:602466. doi: 10.3389/fpsyg.2020.602466

Received: 03 September 2020; Accepted: 26 October 2020; Published: 30 November 2020.

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Copyright © 2020 Benevene, Buonomo and West. This is an open-access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License (CC BY) . The use, distribution or reproduction in other forums is permitted, provided the original author(s) and the copyright owner(s) are credited and that the original publication in this journal is cited, in accordance with accepted academic practice. No use, distribution or reproduction is permitted which does not comply with these terms.

*Correspondence: Paula Benevene, benevene@lumsa.it

Disclaimer: All claims expressed in this article are solely those of the authors and do not necessarily represent those of their affiliated organizations, or those of the publisher, the editors and the reviewers. Any product that may be evaluated in this article or claim that may be made by its manufacturer is not guaranteed or endorsed by the publisher.

Servant Leadership and Volunteerism

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The purpose of this general review is to present philosophical foundation of the tenets of Greenleaf’s take on the concept of servant leadership and how it applies to volunteerism from the participant’s perspective. The author describes discovering and following the call to volunteerism from the perspective of the volunteer, and explains how the precepts of servant leadership apply to volunteers and their altruistic approach to volunteerism. An extensive review of the literature, including recent journal articles and works, considers various aspects of servant leadership as it pertains to the volunteer community. Findings include an explanation of how higher epistemic cognition is achieved in volunteerism through follower growth by means of self-actualization. Practical and social implications are also given.

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Breslin, E.J. (2017). Servant Leadership and Volunteerism. In: Davis, C. (eds) Servant Leadership and Followership. Palgrave Studies in Leadership and Followership. Palgrave Macmillan, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-59366-1_1

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Build Great Leaders Through Volunteerism

What makes a great leader? Some traits that come to mind might be decisiveness, confidence, empathy, and the ability to motivate a team. No matter the traits, each skill is gained through practical experience, and, as the world recovers from the COVID crisis, the workforce can now turn their focus toward their personal and professional development. Similarly, the unprecedented times we have all witnessed in the past year have shed light on the need for volunteers in communities. Volunteerism provides benefits far beyond the obvious help to charitable causes—it is also a catalyst for developing leadership skills in working professionals.

How Volunteerism Shapes Professional Success , a study conducted by Markitects, Inc. , surveyed 90 working professionals with an average of 24 years in the workforce to assess the effect volunteerism has on professional development. Out of the 90 participants surveyed, 83% of respondents listed leadership as a skill they acquired, improved, or developed as a result of volunteering.

Volunteering for a charitable cause can expand capabilities in an individual that will launch a pathway to leadership in the workplace. Here’s how:

1. Volunteers participate outside of their comfort zone.

Employees who report to the same office or work from their home every day may not find themselves outside their comfort zones very often. A change in environment encourages an individual to gain new perspectives. Volunteering allows individuals to be put in front of new challenges and step up to the plate to tackle problems they might not otherwise face. Utilizing specialized expertise in a new environment is an especially great way to build those professional skills.

2. Volunteerism helps build a network.

Volunteering is a perfect opportunity for networking because participants have access to an array of new faces. Interacting with a new, diverse group of people presents an opportunity to work on communication skills while increasing a contact list and knowledge base in multiple industries.

Connecting with others also allows individuals to reflect on who they are and what they stand for; bringing that passion and a new set of professional contacts back to the workplace can be invaluable to one’s career.

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While one’s everyday workload will help employees develop ‘hard’ skills (technical training in a respective field), volunteering can develop the participant’s soft skills. Soft skills include integrity, adaptability, and creativity among many other traits important to leadership. In a recent study by Indeed , of 1,000 hiring managers, the top five attributes of top performers at their companies were problem-solving, effective communication skills, self-direction, drive, and flexibility—all soft skills. An individual with these skills will more easily inspire and motivate others to grow personally and professionally—making that individual more suited for leadership roles.

4. Volunteerism teaches planning and organizational skills.

A great leader is also a great planner and organizer. Rallying a team of people behind a unified cause in a volunteer setting is an accessible practice in leadership. Volunteering often requires planning meetings, organizing events, and coordinating with others. Participants learn how to set a goal, define an effective course of action, and track results. These skills learned through volunteerism are transferable through all career paths and are especially important in leaders.

There are so many amazing causes and organizations out there, each needing volunteers to thrive. Getting involved takes commitment, but those who give their time for free are building the foundation for an abundant career and personal life while accelerating their climb up the professional ladder. Every hour given in the form of volunteering is a chance to see unique challenges through new perspectives, build relationships, and master new skills.

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Importance of Volunteerism Essay

Need to write an essay about volunteering? Community service is a truly hot topic! This argumentative essay about the importance of volunteerism contains everything necessary to inspire you!

Introduction

Importance of volunteering.

It is so disappointing that many people within our societies do not know, understand or value the importance of services in the community by volunteering. Serving society is very important in helping to solve many problems, especially those that have been neglected by the government and other social programs.

Volunteering to serve the community is not only beneficial to the individuals involved, but it is necessary in creating better societies for all. For instance, community members may volunteer to clean up a town near them or feeder roads.

This way, all members benefit by living in a clean environment that is free from illnesses related to sanitation. By cleaning the compounds surrounding them, society members help promote the health of their young ones who are always playing, during which time they can eat anything on the ground which would have otherwise caused them serious infections.

Community work does not always revolve around environmental work, but it is equally important for the fortunate members of society to help those who are less fortunate. Community members may volunteer to offer gifts and other services to help the less fortunate ones.

For example, people may contribute goods such as clothes and food to help the street children who have no homes or take them to children’s homes from where they can be provided for. This way, the members of society will have helped others live a more and better comfortable life.

Especially young children will feel the love that they never got from their parents. This is essential in the growth and development of a child, and the assistance and love they receive from society will surely help them grow to be better adults in society (Landry 1).

Volunteer work in our societies basically involves sharing and friendship through which people can find out what others need so that they can work on assisting them in all ways possible. Through volunteer work, many people’s lives are changed, be it through words or material assistance.

For instance, a community may volunteer to help young people addicted to drugs where they organize meetings with them, and doctors or psychiatrists volunteer to talk to them about the effects of drugs as the community helps them avoid the vise by giving them jobs to keep them busy.

Being responsive to the needs of other people makes us realize and appreciate humanity and spiritual being, as well as feeling good for changing someone’s life. This can even help shy people gain self-esteem. Volunteering in society work helps in promoting and building our social obligations as human beings.

Through community volunteer work, people are able to respect each because they work together without any discrimination. Volunteerism can be thought of as a social capital where everyone is concerned for the well-being of others. It also helps create trust and confidence between society members and brings society together (McHenry 1).

A society where people volunteer and work together always faces fewer problems since all the members tend to get along well and support each when they are in need.

The security of society is also improved, especially through the rehabilitation of street children and drug addicts who are more likely to cause insecurity in society. By supporting each other, society members can live in harmony and be happier than those societies that do not work together.

Importance of Volunteering: FAQ

• What Is Volunteer Work? Volunteering is unpaid work done by a person to benefit the community. In other words, volunteering means that someone is giving their time to help an individual, a group of people, or a non-profit organization.
• Why Is Volunteerism Important? Volunteer work develops and improves the community. Besides, it is helpful for the one who deals with it. Volunteering can improve one’s mental health, reduce stress, and give meaning to their life.
• How Does Volunteerism Benefit the Community? Volunteering is related to the need for people to participate in their community and be important to others. Imbued with such values as reciprocity, solidarity, and mutual trust, it significantly improves the quality of life.

Works Cited

Landry, L. “The importance of volunteering.” 2002. Web.

McHenry, W. “ The Importance of Community Service . ” 2000. Web.

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IvyPanda. (2023, October 29). Importance of Volunteerism Essay. https://ivypanda.com/essays/importance-of-volunteerism/

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1. IvyPanda . "Importance of Volunteerism Essay." October 29, 2023. https://ivypanda.com/essays/importance-of-volunteerism/.

Bibliography

IvyPanda . "Importance of Volunteerism Essay." October 29, 2023. https://ivypanda.com/essays/importance-of-volunteerism/.

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Best Practices for Engaging Volunteer Leaders

Posted Wednesday, June 2nd, 2021 by Sterling Volunteers Staff

Engaging volunteer leaders offers you the opportunity to move from “doing it all” to “getting it done” at your nonprofit organization. In fact, by modeling the change you want to see, you empower volunteers to lead teams, projects and initiatives, and free up paid staff to do the work for which they are uniquely qualified.

In a recent webinar , which is now available on-demand, nonprofit expert Beth Steinhorn, President of VQ Volunteer Strategies , shared strategies and helpful tools for engaging volunteer leaders. She outlined how to articulate the benefits of engaging volunteer leaders; assess needs to identify new potential leader positions; identify traits of potential leaders; and reflect on the benefits and barriers to effective delegation.

Leadership can mean many things, so you will want to consider the various leadership roles a volunteer can assume at your organization. Think about their leading teams including committees, projects, initiatives, groups of other volunteers, and more.

Why Engage Volunteer Leaders?

Volunteer leaders can increase your organization’s capacity, relieve staff members’ workloads, build meaningful relationships with other volunteers, and bring new skills and perspectives to your organization.

An example that helps put the effect of engaging volunteers for leadership into perspective is from Home Health and Hospice Care and their specially trained vigil volunteers that provide presence and comfort to actively dying patients. A Volunteer Coordinator describes, “Before we had Vigil Team Leaders, I was challenged by the prospect of scaling our volunteer program and the services we provide. Engaging Vigil Team Leaders has been a light at the end of the tunnel. If I didn’t have this option of leadership volunteers, then I would not have been able to do my job.”

For more details on this case study, download the eToolkit Engaging Volunteer Leaders which also offers six useful tools for needs assessment and building plans.

Engaging Leaders in the Volunteer Lifecycle

Engaging volunteers in any role should involve assessing needs, writing position descriptions, thoughtful recruiting and screening, equipping volunteers for success, and measuring and celebrating volunteer impact. But engaging volunteers as leaders can pose some additional challenges within the volunteer lifecycle.

Effectively empowering volunteers as leaders may require overcoming resistance from colleagues, more thoughtful work planning, garnering sufficient resources to train and support volunteer leaders, honing delegation skills, and investing in their leadership development.

The topics and tools featured in our new eToolkit are designed to enhance existing volunteer engagement practices. When seeking to utilize the potential of volunteer leaders, these tools will help you:

• Advocate for volunteer leaders by reducing barriers
• Identify needs and plan the work
• Delegate the work and support volunteer leaders to success
• Develop current and future leader

Advocating for Engaging Volunteer Leaders

Volunteer leaders can build the capacity of staff throughout an organization, but many professionals are reluctant to empower volunteer leaders and uncomfortable delegating responsibilities. Effectively advocating for volunteer leadership requires not only an ability to articulate the benefits of engaging volunteer leaders but also understanding what gets in the way of delegating.

Staff reluctance to delegation can stem from multiple sources, including:

• Lack of skills to effectively delegate
• Fear of being replaced by volunteers
• Resistance to changing how work gets done
• Reluctance to give up control over the work
• Past experiences that did not go well
• Lack of trust in volunteers’ ability to be successful

Complete the Building Support for Engaging Volunteer Leaders tool in the eToolkit to help you advocate and inspire colleagues to engage volunteer leaders in their work. Also, think about how the volunteer’s and organization’s perspectives differ. You will want to consider what tends to get in the way when engaging volunteer leaders. Understanding the concerns that underlie these barriers will help you inspire others to overcome obstacles to delegation.

Identifying Needs and Planning the Work

Building support for engaging volunteer leaders sets the stage for successful volunteer leadership but ensuring that the role addresses a true organizational need and planning the work is equally vital. Whether leading a team or a project, volunteer leadership should be deployed toward a purpose that is authentic and pressing.

To help you identify needs that volunteer leaders can address, you should:

• Review strategic plans to identify organizational priorities
• Assess internal processes to identify gaps that a volunteer may be able to close
• Have staff review departmental and personal action plans to identify areas where success is constrained by capacity
• Consider which programs or initiatives the organization wishes to expand or replicate

Before confirming the project or need for volunteer leadership, try the Checklist to Assess Needs and Readiness to ensure the leadership role will be strategic, appealing to prospective volunteers, and sufficiently supported.

Once you have a list of possible needs, then assess whether the need is appropriate, and the organization is ready to engage volunteers as leaders. Next, develop a detailed work plan to guide the effort.

Delegating Work and Supporting Leaders

Once you have built support for engaging volunteer leaders and crafted a work plan, it is time to cultivate a leader. As with any recruitment effort, you can look externally and recruit from the community at large, or you can look internally for an emerging leader. Along with standard recruitment strategies of online search engines, tapping social media networks, and peer-to-peer recruitment, consider who among your current volunteers may be ready to move up and take on more responsibility.

Volunteers who are ready to move up, display behaviors that often:

• Express aspirations
• Take initiative
• Ask great questions
• Offer solutions
• Problem-solve well
• Follow through
• Care about meeting and evaluating results
• Take on progressive responsibility
• Improve after feedback

Is it Time to Delegate?

It’s time to consider developing your delegation skills when you feel like you’re rowing alone, working late, and touching every decision, or If you’re constantly bombarded with questions and your team feels as though you don’t trust them.

Delegation does not come naturally, but it’s worth it. A few main reasons people resist delegating, includes insecurity, desire for control, lack of training, lack of clarity or perspective, overprotection, and history. However, effective delegation means setting clear expectations around who has authority for each element of the work. For any volunteer-led initiative, the staff and volunteer leader should agree upon the intended results.

Effective delegation also involves clearly communicating levels of authority. Breakdowns in delegation usually can be traced to lack of clarity around such details as level of authority. When engaging a volunteer leader, determine the delegation level and communicate with the volunteer leader so that everyone understands and agrees.

Consider these levels of delegation:

• Level 1 : Follow my instructions . Make it clear that your directions need to be followed as given.
• Level 2 : Gather information and report . Assign volunteers to gather information and report on findings. Make it clear that you will discuss the findings, but the decision is up to you.
• Level 3 : Investigate and make recommendations . Assign research and request a report with recommendations. You will still need to approve actions moving forward.
• Level 4 : Authority to decide. Grant decision-making authority to the volunteer leader, while being clear that you still expect to be kept informed.
• Level 5 : Authority to act independently. Authorize the volunteer to do whatever they think is best without the expectation that they will report back.

There is a specific tool to help you zero in on the level that is appropriate and help you determine and communicate the delegation level your tasks require.

How do I Support Volunteer Leaders?

While delegation involves empowering others to get work done, such empowerment does not mean a lack of support. We can–and should–delegate authority to volunteer leaders while also supporting them. Check out the Support Plan to ensure each volunteer leader has a designated support person and that this support person has time set aside to communicate, nurture accountability, help problem solve as needed, and recognize the volunteer and team along the way. Be sure to ask yourself:

• What training is needed? What gaps in knowledge or skill will impede success?
• Whose support is needed? Who is the primary contact? When will you meet/communicate?
• What communications are needed to the team? Do others understand the role of the leader?
• How will success be defined? Do the leaders know if/when they are successful?

Individual Volunteer Plans

Volunteer leadership is a capacity building strategy. To sustain the strategy, organizations must invest in volunteer leaders through training and development. Such support demonstrates to volunteers that the organization values their unique skills and commitment. In turn, volunteers are more likely to remain dedicated to the organization.

Individualized support tailored to personal aspirations and needs can transform an emerging leader into a competent leader–and can elevate a current leader into a deeply committed one. The Individual Volunteer Plan is a practical, collaborative tool designed to facilitate conversation between volunteers and staff partners about pathways to leadership. By working through the tool together, staff and volunteers:

• Assess the volunteer’s current competencies
• Explore areas for growth
• Identify opportunities for training, mentoring, and coaching
• Commit to providing training and new leadership responsibilities
• Schedule a time to reevaluate and update the plan
• Celebrate the value of volunteer contributions

Watch the Webinar On-Demand

To learn more, watch the “ Engaging Volunteer Leaders ” webinar. In addition, download the “Engaging Volunteer Leaders: Going from Doing it All to Getting it Done” eToolkit here .

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The information contained herein is for informational purposes only. Sterling is not a law firm, and none of the information contained in this notice is intended as legal advice. Clients are encouraged to consult with their legal counsel about the impacts of any requirements. This, and other important information can be found on the Sterling website at sterlingcheck.com .

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Volunteerism: My Experience by Nori

Noriof Syracuse's entry into Varsity Tutor's May 2018 scholarship contest

Volunteerism: My Experience by Nori - May 2018 Scholarship Essay

Community service has become a major aspect of my life that has shaped me into who I am today. Volunteering is a way that I can give back to the world that does so much for me. There is no one way to define community service, because everyone has their own definition. However, it is not the definition itself that matters; it is what community service means to you. Is it the laughter of the special needs children when I help them bounce on the trampoline at cheer practice? Is it the squeals of the recreational cheer team that I coached when they win a competition? Maybe it is the joy on the faces of the veterans when they win a round of bingo. To me, volunteering and community service are all of these things. Volunteerism is a donation of my time in order to enhance someone’s life, even if it is only slightly. I view volunteering as a window through which I have an opportunity to change the lives of people, as well as my own. However, volunteering is not only about aiding others. It offers so much more. Through volunteering, I learned valuable community and social skills, and well as gained valuable work experience. I learned how to work with children, the elderly, and those with special needs. In addition, I learned what it is like to have a job and responsibilities. Volunteering has played in a significant role in the shaping of who I am today. Community service has been a resource for me to express myself and gain control of my life. After my father passed and my mother suffered a major stroke, leaving her permanently impaired, I sought an outlet, or an escape. I desperately needed a positive activity to take my mind off of the hardships I was experiencing. That outlet was community service. After a visit to my mother in the hospital, I would go to the public library and volunteer with their children’s activities. Seeing the overwhelming smiles of children after reading them a story made me forget about my problems at home. Volunteering has always been a way to bring joy into my life and to make my day (as well as someone else’s) a little bit better! My first significant volunteer experience was coaching a special needs cheerleading team. As a special needs coach, I had to control a group of special needs children. They struggled to do many things on their own, and looked to me to lead them. It is from this experience that I learned to be a leader. I volunteered as their coach during my freshman year of high school, and that is when my leadership skills truly began to develop. I was responsible for instructing the team on cheerleading and ensuring that they did everything safely. When they would go out and compete, they would bring tears to my eyes. I have never met such an inspiring group of kids, and it is from them that I learned that no matter what comes in my way, anything is possible if you give it your best effort, and that all hardships can be overcome. Coaching Team FIRE was not always an easy job. There were many meltdowns and times when I would want to give up. However, the joy that lit up their faces when times were good motivated me to keep going. From them, I learned perseverance. They would be elated when they successfully completed a forward roll, or learned a new dance. Every day, with their joy, they would remind me to enjoy the small things in life, and I will forever appreciate the endless giggles we’ve shared. That team made me proud and made me recognize how lucky I am to be healthy and well. They taught me that someone is always in need of help, and with my help, that person can succeed. Community service made me realize that I wanted to participate in a profession that helped people. At first, I was unsure of what I aspired to be when I grew up, but I knew one thing: I wanted to make an impact in people’s lives. I developed a love of science, and asked myself how I could help people with science. I decided that my goal was to become a forensic chemist, so I could help solve crimes. That way, if a crime was inflicted upon someone or a loved one, those people would receive justice thanks to me. I truly feel as if volunteering has helped me recognize what it is I aspire to be in the future. In addition, I have goals of participating in more volunteer work throughout my life. Volunteering is a significant way to make the world a better place and to grow as a person. I have impacted numerous lives through volunteering, and that is something that I take great pride in. Whether it was reading to children at the library, helping veterans play bingo, giving Thanksgiving meals to the less fortunate, or anything else, I made someone’s day better, and that is an amazing feeling. In addition, I have developed numerous skills through volunteer work. I feel as if I have grown significantly through my community service. Community service has shaped me into a responsible leader. I am grateful for all that volunteering has done for me.

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6 Common Leadership Styles — and How to Decide Which to Use When

• Rebecca Knight

Being a great leader means recognizing that different circumstances call for different approaches.

Research suggests that the most effective leaders adapt their style to different circumstances — be it a change in setting, a shift in organizational dynamics, or a turn in the business cycle. But what if you feel like you’re not equipped to take on a new and different leadership style — let alone more than one? In this article, the author outlines the six leadership styles Daniel Goleman first introduced in his 2000 HBR article, “Leadership That Gets Results,” and explains when to use each one. The good news is that personality is not destiny. Even if you’re naturally introverted or you tend to be driven by data and analysis rather than emotion, you can still learn how to adapt different leadership styles to organize, motivate, and direct your team.

Much has been written about common leadership styles and how to identify the right style for you, whether it’s transactional or transformational, bureaucratic or laissez-faire. But according to Daniel Goleman, a psychologist best known for his work on emotional intelligence, “Being a great leader means recognizing that different circumstances may call for different approaches.”

• RK Rebecca Knight is a journalist who writes about all things related to the changing nature of careers and the workplace. Her essays and reported stories have been featured in The Boston Globe, Business Insider, The New York Times, BBC, and The Christian Science Monitor. She was shortlisted as a Reuters Institute Fellow at Oxford University in 2023. Earlier in her career, she spent a decade as an editor and reporter at the Financial Times in New York, London, and Boston.

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• Leadership Emergence Through Volunteerism: A Case Study of Late Adolescent Exemplars

Andy Harris and Troy E. Beckert, Ph.D. 10.12806/V18/I2/R9

Introduction

Leadership education has become an increasingly prominent component of a college education (Huber, 2002). This increased focus has filtered down to education and programming for youth as well. As early as elementary school, programs strive to help children develop leadership capacities through character development and interpersonal skills training (Ullestad, 2009). Just as leadership lacks a single definition, the notion of youth leadership is inconsistent across programs (Klau, 2006). Roach, Wyman, Brookes, Chavez, Heath, and Valdes (1999) suggest that while endeavors to create leadership programs for youth is good, this lack of a theoretical foundation allows youth practitioners to create programs that reflect their own beliefs about what is best for leadership development. One example of this would be Van Linden and Fertman (1998) suggesting that adolescents are leaders by spending time with peers, babysitting, being involved with the school or community, and by volunteering. While this sentiment reflects more modern notions in which leadership is not an inherent quality but a capacity that anyone can develop (Dugan & Komives, 2007), suggesting that anything could be considered leadership; this does not promote leadership development among young people.

Despite the disparate views of what leadership is, Bass (2008) suggests that there are four common themes in modern definitions of leadership: (a) the leader as a person, (b) the behaviors of the leader, (c) the effects of the leader, and (d) the interactive process between the leader and the follower. These themes reflect the post-industrial paradigm of leadership that is more process focused and change directed (Rost, 1993). The Social Change Model (SCM) of Leadership Development (HERI, 1996) falls under this post-industrial paradigm. The SCM was designed as a collegiate leadership educational tool and is the most used leadership model in colleges and universities in the United States (Owen, 2012). The central idea of this model is that leadership is a process whereby an individual (the leader) marshals the support of others to create positive social change. The leader is able to do this by developing capacities across three domains, individual, group, and societal/community. Within each of these domains are values that the leader must foster. These values are referred to as the Seven Cs. Within the individual domain leaders must develop a consciousness of self and of personal values, they must develop congruence in living those values, and a commitment to action. Within the group domain a leader must foster collaboration and common purpose with others as well as engage in controversy with civility. Finally, in the societal/community domain, a leader needs to engender a sense of citizenship. These seven values lead to the ultimate goal of the social change model, an eighth C of change, specifically, positive social change (Komives, Wagner & Associates, 2016).

Adolescents have many opportunities to participate in positive social change through volunteerism and activism. In the United States, about one in four adolescents engage in volunteer activities (Corporation for National & Community Service, 2015). Adolescent volunteerism is associated with numerous positive outcomes. Adolescents who volunteer show gains in positive identity development (Pancer, Pratt, Hunsberger, & Alisat, 2007), better academic outcomes (Johnson, Beebe, Mortimer, & Snyder, 1998) positive attitudes about one’s ability to impact their community (Janzen, Pancer, Nelson, Loomis, & Hasford, 2010) and are more likely to engage civically as adults (Youniss, McLellan, & Yates, 1997). Undoubtedly, volunteerism is a noble endeavor that positively affects both the youth volunteers and those they serve (Omoto & Snyder, 2002). However, we think that leadership involves more than simply participating in community service.

Authority is the ingredient that propels leadership into something more than passive volunteerism. MacNeil (2006) defines authority as influence and decision-making power. In addition to the ideas presented earlier that leadership is a relationship process and involves creating change, MacNeil (2006) argues that the use of authority (influence and decision-making power) is critical to leadership. Because of negative stereotypes surrounding the dependability of adolescents, those who would teach youth leadership often withhold real authority even if youth are able to hold leadership positions in youth organizations. As one program developer lamented, “teenagers are often regarded by adults as not old or experienced enough to hold meaningful official leadership roles” (Ferrence Ray, 2016, p. 101). Without the exercise of authority, “young people are simply learning about leadership rather than learning leadership” (MacNeil, 2006, p. 38). Because of the societal pushback on adolescent use of authority, it would be easy to suggest, like Van Linden and Fertman (1998), that under the SCM, an adolescent can be a leader by simply volunteering. Nonetheless, simply volunteering falls short of the complete definition of leadership because there is no practice of authority. We suggest that the emergence of leadership through volunteerism occurs when an individual goes from participating in volunteer work to creating volunteer opportunities for themselves and others. Beyond merely participating in social change, leaders are those who create it.

Programs that aim to promote youth leadership development using the Social Change Model need to foster the use of authority. A good example of this kind of program is the one described by Schwartz and Suyemoto (2013) where youth leaders learn community organizing skills and determine what social issues they would like to address. In order to guide more programs such as this, we need to better understand the process whereby a young person moves from participating in volunteerism to creating opportunities for volunteerism.

The purpose of this study was to examine the process whereby a young person emerges as a leader by moving from participating in social change to creating social change. To accomplish this, we interviewed late adolescents who had demonstrated leadership and authority by creating volunteerism opportunities. Guiding our inquiry were the following research questions:

• What characteristics do emerging adolescent leaders possess?
• What resources do adolescents utilize in their journey toward leadership emergence?
• How do emerging adolescent leaders describe the obstacles they experienced while engaging in social change work?

Sample.  Participants for this study were recruited with the help of Hugh O’Brian Youth Leadership (HOBY), a non-profit organization that provides leadership training to high school students across the United States and internationally. HOBY uses the SCM as a foundation for its curriculum throughout its various programs. Students who participate in a HOBY program are taught leadership skills and are encouraged to volunteer in their communities (Ferrence Ray, 2016). Participants selected for this study were HOBY alumni who were identified as examplars of leadership according to the framework we have laid out. Each participant demonstrated leadership by creating service opportunities and social change. All but one of the participants in our study also attended a HOBY program called the Advanced Leadership Academy (ALA). ALA’s curriculum is designed to help participants create an action plan to complete a particular community service or social entrepreneurship project over the course of 12 months (Ferrence Ray, 2016).

From a list of thirteen exemplary program alumni provided by HOBY administrators, we identified seven potential participants based on descriptions of their excellent community service work. We contacted each of them explaining the purpose of the study and asked if they would be willing to share their leadership story through an interview. Of the seven participants initially identified, six responded to the invitation to participate and five completed all the study procedures. Because this group was homogenous in terms of the phenomena being studied (Sandelowski, 1995), we think that we had reached data saturation with the five participants and so we did not contact any of the remaining potential participants.  Two of the five participants were female and three of the five participants were ethnic minorities. The participants were demographically diverse, but we will not provide specific demographic details in this section to protect the privacy of participants. A brief description of each participant preludes his or her story below.

Procedure.  We contacted the participants via e-mail and invited them to respond if they were interested in participating in the study. Informed consent was completed prior to scheduling an interview. The participants told their stories of leadership and volunteerism during a semi-structured video-conferencing interview. Each interview lasted between thirty and forty-five minutes. The interview was designed to allow the participants an opportunity to tell their stories of volunteerism and social change work in a way that was important to them. Prior to the interview, we sent participants a list of questions to consider (e.g. “Why did you dedicate yourself to this cause and not another?”, “What victories have you experienced”, “What challenges have you experienced?” “What support have you received?”). At the beginning of the interview, the participants told their story uninterrupted while the interviewer took notes. The lead author, who has volunteered with the HOBY organization and its programs, conducted these interviews and asked follow-up and clarifying questions to elicit detail to the participants’ stories.

Analytic Process.  Following the interview, we transcribed the interactions verbatim in preparation for coding.  Throughout transcription and again once all transcription was complete, the lead author consulted the original data to gain a sense of totality by reading through the interviews multiple times prior to the coding phase.

Initial coding took place in three stages. The first author began by coding interviews using In Vivo Coding, where the contents of the interviews is broken down into thematic chunks of data. With In Vivo Coding, the codes reflect the actual language of the participant (Strauss, 1987). This was done to preserve the integrity of the participants’ voice, which is especially important when coding interviews with youth (Saldaña, 2016). Next, we employed pattern coding to classify the codes that emerged during the initial analysis (Miles, Huberman, & Saldaña, 2014). Finally, anchored in the research and theory on positive youth development and leadership, we conducted a directed content analysis of the pattern codes (Hsieh & Shannon, 2005). The purpose of this phase of analysis was to uncover specific themes related to our original research questions. Following the coding process, all identifiable information was removed and names were replaced with pseudonyms in order to protect the confidentiality of our participants.

To further establish trustworthiness of the analysis, we used two strategies.  First, the second author acted as a check by reading through the coded material to verify accuracy and completeness.  Next, we used member checking by allowing the original participants to read the results section of the manuscript to judge the accuracy and credibility of the account from their perspective (Creswell, 2013). Minor adjustments were made based on their feedback.

The following are short summaries of each participant’s story of leadership emergence through community service. At the time of the interviews, participants were in their first or second year of undergraduate university studies and were reflecting back to when they were 15 to 18 years old.

Chad. When Chad was eleven years old, his dad passed away due to Parkinson’s disease. With a desire to bring awareness to and raise money for Parkinson’s disease, Chad began planning a 5k walk/run event. During that time, Chad’s neighbor Suzy had a grandfather who also passed away from Parkinson’s disease. Together they held a successful event that raised over $4,000 that they donated towards Parkinson’s disease research. Chad and Suzy together formed a non-profit organization to expand their work and make the 5k walk/run an annual event.

Elisabeth. Growing up, Elisabeth recognized that food equality was a major problem in the United States. She did not think that it was fair that she had access to fresh and healthy foods while others in her community did not. She started volunteering at food pantries and local community kitchens and eventually connected with an organization called Feeding Children Everywhere. Elisabeth organized a campaign at her high school, raised over $3,000 dollars, and packed over 12,000 meals for Feeding Children Everywhere.

  Danny. Through several formative personal experiences, Danny became passionate about gender equality, interpersonal violence, and sexual assault.  Danny organized an educational campaign at his high school to raise awareness about issues surrounding domestic violence and abuse. His campaign included delivering an educational lecture, posting public service announcements at school, and organizing a walk event. During the course of the campaign, students also prepared 75 care packages and raised $8,000 dollars for the local domestic abuse shelter.

  Omar. When Omar was in early adolescence when he began volunteering with organizations that worked to address poverty in third-world countries. When on a trip to a college campus near his uncle’s home, Omar asked his uncle if he had a bag he could use while he was visiting the campus. His uncle showed him a “giant garbage bag” full of bags that he had received through attending various conferences. Seeing an opportunity to redistribute these unused resources to those in need, Omar started contacting conferences and asking permission to set up donation bins for attendees to donate their unwanted bags at the end of the conference. Omar set up a non-profit organization that would collect those bags and put them in the hands of other charities that would send them to developing nations so that children would have a bag to carry to school.

Taylor. Taylor is one of three daughters of a same-sex couple. Growing up in the Southern United States, she experienced prejudice from her community because of her family makeup. Taylor and her sisters began documenting their discrimination through social media to bring awareness to the experiences of children of same-sex couples in the United States. LGBT rights groups invited Taylor to sign an amicus brief submitted to the Supreme Court and to participate in rallies held in Washington D. C. while the Supreme Court deliberated on the case of marriage equality.

Nine themes emerged from these data through our coding process (see Table 1). In response to our first research question, “what characteristics do emerging adolescent leaders possess?”, the themes of involvement, passion, confidence, skills, ownership, and mentorship describe the data. For our second research question, “what resources do adolescents utilize in their journey toward leadership emergence?”, the following two themes emerged, mentors and positive networks. Finally, for our question “how do emerging adolescent leaders describe the obstacles they experienced while engaging in social change work?”, the theme of overcoming obstacles emerged. We illustrate the importance and role of each theme below.

Involvement.  Prior to and after their emergence as leaders, the youth whom we interviewed described being very involved in a number of extracurricular activities. Chad recalled feeling like a big fish in a small pond in high school and that he was a part of “too many clubs.” Danny likewise felt drawn to opportunities where he would be recognized in high school, which led him to participate in extracurricular activities. Even our participants’ participation in a HOBY program speaks to their involvement in extracurricular activities as most schools have a selection process for students to attend. This process usually requires applications, essays, and interviews.

It is not surprising that these youth leaders were involved in extracurricular activities prior to their emergence as leaders. Research has consistently shown that youth who engaged in extracurricular, non-academic activities demonstrate positive development during adolescence and into adulthood (Eccles, Barber, Stone, & Hunt, 2003). These positive effects are more pronounced for youth who are involved for longer periods of time across a variety of contexts (Fredricks & Eccles, 2006). Similar findings comes from the Multi-Institutional Study of Leadership (Dugan & Komives, 2007). Extracurricular activities facilitate the development of initiative (Larson, 2000) which would be important to their emergence as leaders through volunteerism. Participation in extracurricular activities is also related to participation in volunteer activities (Youniss, McLellan, Su, & Yates, 1999). Further, participation in volunteer work in adolescence is related to stronger intentions to continue to volunteer (Taylor & Pancer, 2007), as was the case for this sample. Danny describes how volunteering earlier in life led to further involvement in volunteering. Danny’s parents purchased a rundown farm when he was six and turned it into an equestrian therapy ranch for persons with disabilities. When recalling the work he did with his parents, Danny felt as though the experience “shaped [him]” and “made [him] really passionate about community service.”

Passion.  Passion is essential to the emergence of leadership through volunteerism. Without passion, adolescents are unlikely to take advantage of opportunities to develop as leaders (Bronk & McLean, 2016). Passion is an inclination towards an activity that a person enjoys, finds important, and invests significant time and energy (Vallerand et al., 2003). Passions develop through a process of selection, valuation, and internalization. Selection occurs as an individual engages in an activity she/he finds enjoyable. This leads to further engagement with that activity. The more energy and time someone invests in an activity the more valued it becomes (Vallerand et al., 2003). Eventually, passions are internalized and become a part of an individual’s identity (Vallerand, 2012). When the selection, valuation and internalization processes are motivated intrinsically, passions lead to greater engagement and meaning in life as opposed to passions that develop due to intrapersonal and/or interpersonal pressures (Mageau et al., 2009). For all the participants, their projects were rooted in a cause they were passionate about. They selected their passions after personal experiences that brought certain issues to their attention. After becoming aware of these issues, they put increasing value on those causes until they have become a part of their identity.

Elisabeth developed passion for food inequality over a process of time. She was unaware of food inequality until she heard some other kids at school talking about government assistance programs. After becoming aware of the issue, Elisabeth began researching the topic for school projects. “I realized, like, people just don’t have the same opportunities as others. I can eat all the organic vegetables I want but someone a few streets down will be, like, eating canned food and boxed food and processed food… it just bothered me that everyone didn’t have the same equal opportunity to eat, like, properly or nutritiously.” This increasing valuation of food inequality led her to volunteer with various organizations like soup kitchens and food pantries. Eventually she created her own project to address this issue. Now, she has internalized this passion and it is an important part of her self-concept. She is at a university studying social work with a minor in food systems and she would eventually like to run a non-profit that addresses issues of food inequality. Elisabeth’s story is not unique in this respect. The passions of those we interviewed have influenced their choice of college major they are pursuing in higher education and have developed into what Damon, Menon, and Bronk (2003) call a purpose in life, a set of long reaching goals that contribute to a person’s own search for meaning and the world around them.

Confidence.  The youth in this sample all demonstrated confidence in their ability to create positive social change. All of our participants shared an experience where they realized that they could do something greater than their current volunteer work. Confidence came in two ways for those we interviewed: through their initial attempts to create positive change, and by seeing models of youth leadership. Omar developed confidence through his initial attempt to create positive change After his experience with his uncle, he decided to set up a bag donation bin at a conference and then donate however many bags he received to a charity. “The first conference I went to there were 500 attendees and a little over 300 of them donated their bags and that was kind of eye opening. Everyone there that was seeing me was like ‘you know this could really be something, I go to a lot of conferences, this is a service that is needed, um, why don’t you do something there.’ So from there I thought ‘OK, I guess I could do a non-profit organization.’” While Omar never intended this to be a long-term project, this initial success helped him to develop the confidence needed to move forward. Elisabeth developed confidence after seeing models of social change. Early in high school, Elisabeth learned of another girl in her high school who had started her own non-profit organization that connected her school’s cooking program with the local soup kitchen. “So hearing about a girl who was just in my shoes and my footsteps really helped me to be, like, ‘Hey, I definitely could do something, I want to do something.’” Elisabeth’s confidence grew because this high-school aged model was salient to her.

The experiences that these youths shared make sense from a developmental perspective. Both prior successes and salient models are important to the development of self-efficacy, which refers to a person’s judgments of their capabilities to accomplish a goal (Bandura, 1989). This judgement is one of the primary determinants of whether an individual will engage and or persist in any given behavior (Bandura, 1997). Self-efficacy is manifested both generally as well as in specific domains. Leadership research has shown that individuals with higher levels of leadership self-efficacy set more lofty goals in the practice of their leadership (Kane, Zaccaro, Tremble, & Masuda, 2002). Because of their prior and vicarious experiences through salient models, our participants developed the confidence needed to practice leadership.

Skills.  In addition to confidence in their ability to make a difference, these youths also expressed the importance of developing skills, such as using goal setting, managing project logistics and organizing volunteers. One skill that stood out above all others was that of information literacy. Information literacy is the ability to recognize gaps in knowledge and how to find and evaluate new information (Bruce, 1999). All our participants expressed the value of the Internet for finding information, fundraising, and spreading awareness. Chad mentioned that “the Internet was a huge huge huge tool.” Chad and Suzy created a website and managed pages on social media for their event to spread awareness. They also used an online fundraising site for the majority of fundraising. When Taylor wanted to share her story of discrimination, she used a blog. She realized that to reach a larger audience they would need to change their content. “[We created] a video about our family sort of putting the blog into film um, because we thought that would help us get a wider audience in this day and age. Everybody likes to watch videos more than they like to read articles.” This video was what garnered attention from advocacy groups and got her involved in the marriage equality debate on a larger scale. Finally, when Omar was encouraged to do more by conference attendees who donated their bags, he turned to the internet to see how to create a non-profit organization. “I just looked up how to start one online.” Later when he needed to incorporate with the IRS and could not afford a lawyer to help him, Omar figured it out on his own. “I spent about one or two months just with the instructions and the paperwork filling it out all myself to save the money that we didn’t have to get a lawyer.”

Ownership.  When talking about their projects, our participants used what Larson (2000) called agentic language. This agentic language is important because it demonstrates self-efficacy, intentionality, forethought, self-regulation, and self-reflection (Bandura, 2006), all of which are important to leadership development. Those we interviewed spoke of their experiences in terms of what they accomplished, using possessive pronouns such as “my project.” This agentic language suggests ownership over their work. Omar mentioned how important that sense of ownership is to him. “And so that’s something we’ve always prided ourselves on, you know, we’re an organization for kids by kids. We’re an organization that’s giving these bags, these promotional items, this encouragement, um, to a school child in the developing world and that was all coordinated and orchestrated by another group of students. And I really like that idea and I like that concept a lot.”

Danny spoke extensively about ownership during his interview. He related that during his project he constantly went to his mentors for advice on what to do. In advice seeking, he felt as if he was questioning himself and his abilities rather than trusting that he could do it. This attitude turned around by the end of the project: “And by the end of the project I realized that this was something that I started and I needed to take ownership for it and this is not the adults’ project. This is my project and I need to stop asking for permission and just do and take ownership of that.” Danny related that when he talks to youth about service he always relates the importance of taking ownership for your work. This emphasis on ownership demonstrates these youths’ transition from participating in volunteer work to emerging as leaders and creators of social change.

Mentoring Others.  All of the participants referred to instances in which they have now mentored other youth develop as leaders. Danny’s statement about talking to youth about service was not unique to his story. At the suggestion of her own mentor, Elisabeth agreed to help another young man who also wanted to organize a project on behalf of Feeding Children Everywhere. Additionally, Chad, Elisabeth, and Taylor all volunteered with their local HOBY chapters as junior facilitators, which play an important role during HOBY state seminars in teaching those who attend leadership skills. The most striking example of acting as a mentor came from Omar. While in high school, Omar hired two fellow students to serve as the Chief Marketing Officer and the Chief Operating Officer for his non-profit. “That was another big task, you know, how do you lead people, how do you manage other people and motivate them to be just as passionate about your mission as you are, um, and that was also a really cool experience.” Emerging as leaders, these young people demonstrated a desire to pass what they learned onto others.

Mentors.  Support from adult mentors is important for the development of leadership skills (Hancock, Dyk, & Jones, 2012). A mentor is someone who can provide social capital and advice to a protégé (Barnett, 1984). Those we interviewed described mentors who provided social connections and encouragement. Chad described his mentor, Sarah as someone who had “all the connections in all the right places.” Sarah worked in a county office and was able to connect Chad with individuals, organizations, and agencies necessary to carry out his event. Danny’s mentor helped give him a greater perspective on the needs of his community. This new perspective helped him to adjust his project to better address local needs. Beyond social connections, mentors also played a role in providing encouragement and advice. Elisabeth was especially grateful for her mentor, Nicole. Elisabeth met Nicole through HOBY and asked her to be her mentor because they had a shared interest in nutrition. Referring to Nicole, Elisabeth expressed who she supported her. “If I ever had any questions or anything she was just there and she cheered me on and was happy when I told her about my milestones. Um, yeah, just having her a text away or a call away was just really great.”

Positive Networks.  Beyond the direct support gained from their mentors, our participants spoke of the indirect support they received from a positive network of peers. Chad credited attendance at his local HOBY state seminar as a turning point for him. When asked what specifically made the difference in his leadership, he expressed the importance of the community of peers that HOBY provided. “You’re surrounded by, not all like-minded, but like, equally motivated people. You all come from different backgrounds, different walks of life, and different beliefs but one belief you all share is trying to make positive change in the world.” Making connections with other equally engaged youths was an important component to our sample persisting in trying to make a difference. Omar described it like this, “Getting all these other like-minded people in a room from all across the state really gives you a sense of community. More so on the national level. There are people that are actually dedicating their lives um to doing great, and once you feel like you belong to that community, you’re more reinforced to stay in that community, continue doing what you’re doing.”

One possible explanation for the importance of these positive peer networks lies in Elkind’s conception of personal fable (Elkind, 1967). Elkind suggested that adolescents have an exaggerated egocentric belief that they are special or unique. Personal fables are often linked to adolescent risk-taking behaviors (Greene, Krcmar, Walkters, Rubin & Hale, 2000), and they might also be responsible for some youth’s reluctance to engage in positive behaviors. Youth may entertain the personal, fearing that they are alone in their desire to make a difference in the world. Later in his account of the positive network at HOBY, Chad expressed that he felt like a big fish in a little pond but he found connection because “at HOBY, everyone does all that stuff.” The positive network of peers could be responsible for dispelling a personal fable and encouraging youth to be more active and engaged.

Another possible explanation for the importance of a positive peer network to leadership emergence is the idea of identity capital. The notion of identity capital refers to the collection of tangible and intangible attributes that contribute to an individual’s ability to navigate the transition from adolescence into adulthood. Tangible attributes such as financial stability, educational achievements, social competencies, and group memberships and intangible attributes such as an internal locus of control, self-esteem, and sense of purpose promote a deeper sense of and commitment to the self (Côté, 1997). The positive networks that our participants describe provide some of the tangible attributes and likely promote some of those intangible attributes that would help them to negotiate the more adult roles that come from exercising leadership authority.

Overcoming Obstacles.  Finally, our participants related various obstacles they experienced related to their volunteer and social change activities. These obstacles included discouragement getting started, balancing the amount of work that these projects required, conflict with parents over the amount of time spent with their projects, and lacking the resources they needed to accomplish all that they wanted to do. Encountering obstacles while engaging in social change is predictable, but these youths were noteworthy in their attitudes about overcoming obstacles. For example, Omar felt that overcoming obstacles was valuable to his growth. “The best part of this entire experience was the exercise in just being able to just jump over hurdles and figure out a way to do something and if you can’t like change what you’re doing and then figure that out. And that whole process I think taught me a skill that was at its very essence problem solving, and something that I’ve been able to kind of take and use under every circumstance, which has been great.” All five youths described how they overcame their obstacles by using skills or positive networks.

Elisabeth used newfound skills to overcome her challenges. Elisabeth described an initial project that, in retrospect, was too ambitious.  She indicated that she used skills she had gained to adjust her project to be more manageable. Originally, she wanted to create a non-profit organization and community food kitchen that would connect farmers, dieticians, and cooks with populations in need. “There was just so many different things… I realized that my project … it wasn’t attainable so like one or two months passed and I hadn’t been doing anything.” Facing a project too large to accomplish, Elisabeth used a principle she learned through leadership education called S.M.A.R.T. goals. S.M.A.R.T. is an acronym to remind individuals that goals should be Specific, Measurable, Achievable, Relevant, and Time bound. Rather than giving up on her passion to address food inequality, Elisabeth decided to adjust her plans, “So using SMART goals really helped me to realize, like ‘ok, I’m gonna scale back a little bit, I’m still going to do a major project and it’s still going to take up a majority of my time but the project I had planned was just not going to work.’”

Kinsey utilized positive networks to overcome her challenges. Kinsey expressed feeling discouraged about the political climate in the United States and how important her positive network was in encouraging her to continue her efforts of social change. “People who know me and believe in me were sort of there and reached out, you know and said that they really believed what I stand for and what I’m doing … I had a friend out of the blue just sort of text me and say, ‘ I’m so proud of you for doing that… I think more than ever, I admire you.’”

What our participants demonstrate through overcoming obstacles is grit. Grit is defined as a perseverance and passion for long-term goals. Individuals who possess grit are willing to persist in an activity despite difficulties and failures (Duckworth, Peterson, Matthews, & Kelly, 2007). Inextricably linked to our participants’ demonstration of grit was their passion for a cause (St-Louis, Carbonneau, & Vallerand, 2016). Passion enabled them to persevere beyond difficulties because their passions had become a part of their identities. Omar’s passion for addressing poverty in third world countries enabled him to demonstrate grit. He related an experience of when he tried to volunteer for an organization but was turned down because he was too young, “they made all these promises about how I could help with the shows and stuff but then they said, ‘well, I’m sorry we can’t have a 13-year-old volunteering for us’ or whatever. Then I ended up starting another campaign.” The campaign he started was eventually adopted by the organization he originally tried to volunteer for, “I figured that there was something I could do, even though they didn’t give it to me, I just wasn’t going to sit around and watch. I just wanted to do something.” Omar’s passion fueled his grit as it did for all of those we interviewed.

The emergence of leadership through volunteerism occurs when an individual goes from participating in volunteer work to creating volunteer opportunities for themselves and others. Through the stories of five adolescent emerging leaders, several themes emerged to describe this process. First, our participants were involved in a range of extracurricular activities including volunteerism. Initial involvement in volunteer work provided an opportunity to develop confidence, skills, and passion (Fredricks & Eccles, 2006), which were essential as they stretched beyond organized volunteerism and became the organizers of their own beneficent efforts. This transition marked their emergence as leaders. Beyond involvement, our participants demonstrated several characteristics that were also important to their emergence as leaders. First, their volunteer work was rooted in a passion. For each participant it was different but each of them cared deeply about addressing a societal need. Before they sought to address that need through their own work, they developed confidence to succeed through initial successes during previous volunteer activities and by observing salient models of youth who were engaged in impactful social change. Passion for a cause, confidence, and both direct and indirect support from positive networks and mentors played important roles in how they overcame obstacles and demonstrated grit. In addition to having meaningful societal impact, the experiences of leadership emergence has prepared our sample for a life of continued engagement. During our interviews, this sample described their continued efforts of volunteerism and social change.

The stories that these youth shared demonstrate that not only are adolescents capable of emerging as leaders through volunteerism but that their efforts have far-reaching effects, both for themselves and for society. Young people have the potential to positively impact society, so it is critical that youth leadership development programs do more than simply promote character development and teach interpersonal skills. They must also encourage the development of authority through agency. Young people are capable of affecting their communities in positive ways and should be encouraged and enabled in their efforts. These stories are valuable for identifying ways in which youth development programs can facilitate leadership emergence through volunteerism and social change.

Limitations.  The findings from this study underscore the role of that volunteerism can play in leadership development.  Nonetheless, there are several important limitations to consider related to the current study. Our findings rely on the memories of our participants, rather than on our own observations of young people engaged in social change work. The self-reflective, life stories approach to gaining understanding to past events produces a richness of data that is hard to get through other methods.  However, some caution is warranted when relying on the accuracy of memories from such an emotionally rich time as middle adolescence. Stories were gathered several years after the events happened, which may change the stories themselves. Additionally, all the participants from this study were patrons of the same youth development program within the HOBY organization.  It could be of interest to replicate the study with youth people who have similar stories from other organization to identify the relationship of the program to the outcomes. Finally, the sample of five participants is small but we do not feel that this detracts from what can be learned about adolescent leadership emergence (Flyvbjerg, 2006).  We felt, as the interview process unfolded, that we reached saturation in the data with the five participants but there is no way to know if adding more participants would have provided additional data. . It would be valuable in future research to examine the stories of youth who take initial steps toward authority and leadership but who do not follow through with their ideas.

Implications for Youth Development Programs.  Our findings provide support for Schwartz & Suyemoto’s research (2013) on social change programs. Schwartz and Suyemoto’s work focused on a youth development program called Youth Force (YF), which teaches its participants community organizing skills and encourages them to be active participants in their community.  Their qualitative work was similar to our own and they developed a model of the process of development through participating in Youth Force. Their model suggests that YF provides for its participants both models of teens as agents of change and a structure for action. The program also facilitates the development of skills, knowledge and a peer community. Continued engagement in YF leads to civic action, which in turn promotes and internal change in self-concept. This creates a positive feedback loop into continued civic engagement. While Schwartz and Suyemoto focused their inquiry on the process of change through participation in YF, our findings highlight the characteristics and resources of emerging leaders. In an effort to build on the findings of Schwartz and Suyemoto we propose an expanded model in Figure 1.

Figure 1. Adapted model from Schwartz & Suyemoto, 2013

This adapted model incorporates the themes from the present study with those of Schwartz and Suyemoto. These factors can guide youth development programs to better facilitate the emergence of leadership through volunteerism and social change. Our findings, in concert with those of Schwartz and Suyemoto (2013), suggest that youth development programs should provide salient models, structure for action, and a focus on the passions of its participants.  Additionally, these programs should facilitate a mechanism for mentorship. One of the participants in our study suggested that this mechanism for mentorship was one of the strengths of the ALA program. In addition to knowledge, skills, and a peer community, we suggest that programming should also promote confidence, grit, and ownership. Roach et al. (1999) suggested that leadership education should focus on helping young people see themselves as leaders now, not just in the future, by encouraging them to work together to accomplish bold group projects that are based on the interests of the youth. While they do not suggest that those projects exclusively focus on social change, it is one way to encourage these collaborative projects. Finally, when young people emerge as leaders through volunteerism and social change, they should be given opportunities to mentor other youth. This will provide the salient models that both our research and that of Schwartz and Suyemoto (2013) have shown as an important aspect of programming. YF implements this through its programming by allowing youth who complete the general program to apply to work for YF and be in charge of implementing programming for future participants. Successful aspects of these programs, such as those outlined above, should be incorporated into existing programs that facilitate youth-led social change work such as youth city councils (Carlson, 2006). Beyond facilitating leadership emergence, programs that incorporate these suggestions can have profound impact on communities. We believe that young people have untapped potential to act as agents for positive social change toward improving conditions in their communities and society.

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Activist Wawa Gatheru on Championing Black Women as Climate Leaders This Earth Day—And Beyond

By Wawa Gatheru

Earlier this year, we saw one of the greatest environmental wins of the decade—and Black women were its unsung heroes. President Biden paused all new expansions of dangerous gas export hubs in the U.S., which experts have called carbon bombs . There’s been fanfare and criticism around the decision, but few have acknowledged how Black women made it possible through community organizing and generational grit. The job won’t be done until there is a permanent halt on new expansions of dirty gas. But to get there, we have to turn toward the women who are leading on climate progress around the country.

As a Black girl who grew up in the climate movement, I’ve always been perplexed by the paradox of representation in this space. While people of color are disproportionately impacted by the climate crisis, we are routinely sidelined and boxed as ‘victims’ rather than the leaders we are. This is particularly true for Black women.

Women are particularly at risk to climate impacts because enforced gender inequality makes us more susceptible to escalating environmental harms. Black girls, women, and gender-expansive people in particular, bear an even heavier burden because of the historic and continuing impacts of colonialism, racism, and inequality. And that’s why I believe these circumstances uniquely position Black women as indispensable leaders in the climate movement.

A few years ago, I came across a term that encompassed what I have always known to be true. Coined by Dr. Melanie Harris, eco-womanism is a theological approach to environmental justice that focuses on the viewpoints of Black women across the diaspora. An eco-womanist approach to climate solutions is happening in the underbelly of climate injustice in the US, the Gulf South.

I have been honored to learn from and be inspired by the Black women leading on climate in the Gulf South: leaders like Sharon Lavigne of Rise St. James , Dr. Beverly Wright of the Deep South Center for Environmental Justice , Roishetta Ozane of The Vessel Project of Louisiana , and Dr. Joy and Jo Banner of The Descendants Project . I’ve heard firsthand how they launched educational campaigns, organized marches, rallies, and petitions, commissioned research, joined lawsuits, and challenged everyone from local lawmakers to the EPA—all to protect their communities. Step by step, they have fought polluters in an 85-mile stretch from New Orleans to Baton Rouge that’s home to more than 200 fossil fuel and petrochemical operations, earning the name ‘Cancer Alley.’

By Margaux Anbouba

By Hannah Coates

By Amel Mukhtar

The fight in Cancer Alley is for life, community, and legacy. Where there are now toxins poisoning Black families, there were once plantations enslaving their ancestors. It’s not a coincidence that two history-defining tragedies struck the same area of Louisiana—it is the same system of oppression and racial capitalism in different forms. And it’s no coincidence that the resistance to it calls on a legacy passed down for generations: solidarity, creativity, and bold leadership.

The fight is local and personal, but it’s also global and systemic. And failing to recognize Black women as climate leaders isn’t just a moral dilemma. It is a poor strategic decision for all of us to win on climate.

The same industries that poison Louisiana are also fueling the climate crisis. Last year was the hottest in history , and in 2024, we’ve already seen extreme weather events making this planet increasingly difficult to inhabit. Black and Brown communities might be ground zero for climate change, but our response to this destruction impacts everyone.

The women behind the president’s pause have proven that winning on climate is not impossible. Another world is possible and we can collectively build a better world for all. The organization I founded— Black Girl Environmentalist —puts that lesson into practice around the country. As one of the largest Black youth-led climate organizations, we are ushering the next generation of Black women and gender-expansive individuals into environmental work—cultivating their talent and creativity to protect our communities, and win the fight of our lives against the climate crisis.

As a Gen-Zer, I know how tempting it can be to feel immobilized by eco-anxiety or even climate doom. But we can’t.

We can’t afford to, nor do we have the privilege to. Every fraction of a degree matters. Instead, we must look to and join the leaders who, against all odds, continue to fight and win on climate issues across the country. The pause on dangerous gas expansions showed there is power in our collective voice. Black women have lit the way, showing that the power comes from fighting for—and with—our communities. The work isn’t done, but we’ve come too far to turn back.

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NPR suspends veteran editor as it grapples with his public criticism

David Folkenflik

NPR suspended senior editor Uri Berliner for five days without pay after he wrote an essay accusing the network of losing the public's trust and appeared on a podcast to explain his argument. Uri Berliner hide caption

NPR suspended senior editor Uri Berliner for five days without pay after he wrote an essay accusing the network of losing the public's trust and appeared on a podcast to explain his argument.

NPR has formally punished Uri Berliner, the senior editor who publicly argued a week ago that the network had "lost America's trust" by approaching news stories with a rigidly progressive mindset.

Berliner's five-day suspension without pay, which began last Friday, has not been previously reported.

Yet the public radio network is grappling in other ways with the fallout from Berliner's essay for the online news site The Free Press . It angered many of his colleagues, led NPR leaders to announce monthly internal reviews of the network's coverage, and gave fresh ammunition to conservative and partisan Republican critics of NPR, including former President Donald Trump.

Conservative activist Christopher Rufo is among those now targeting NPR's new chief executive, Katherine Maher, for messages she posted to social media years before joining the network. Among others, those posts include a 2020 tweet that called Trump racist and another that appeared to minimize rioting during social justice protests that year. Maher took the job at NPR last month — her first at a news organization .

In a statement Monday about the messages she had posted, Maher praised the integrity of NPR's journalists and underscored the independence of their reporting.

"In America everyone is entitled to free speech as a private citizen," she said. "What matters is NPR's work and my commitment as its CEO: public service, editorial independence, and the mission to serve all of the American public. NPR is independent, beholden to no party, and without commercial interests."

The network noted that "the CEO is not involved in editorial decisions."

In an interview with me later on Monday, Berliner said the social media posts demonstrated Maher was all but incapable of being the person best poised to direct the organization.

"We're looking for a leader right now who's going to be unifying and bring more people into the tent and have a broader perspective on, sort of, what America is all about," Berliner said. "And this seems to be the opposite of that."

Conservative critics of NPR are now targeting its new chief executive, Katherine Maher, for messages she posted to social media years before joining the public radio network last month. Stephen Voss/Stephen Voss hide caption

Conservative critics of NPR are now targeting its new chief executive, Katherine Maher, for messages she posted to social media years before joining the public radio network last month.

He said that he tried repeatedly to make his concerns over NPR's coverage known to news leaders and to Maher's predecessor as chief executive before publishing his essay.

Berliner has singled out coverage of several issues dominating the 2020s for criticism, including trans rights, the Israel-Hamas war and COVID. Berliner says he sees the same problems at other news organizations, but argues NPR, as a mission-driven institution, has a greater obligation to fairness.

"I love NPR and feel it's a national trust," Berliner says. "We have great journalists here. If they shed their opinions and did the great journalism they're capable of, this would be a much more interesting and fulfilling organization for our listeners."

A "final warning"

The circumstances surrounding the interview were singular.

Berliner provided me with a copy of the formal rebuke to review. NPR did not confirm or comment upon his suspension for this article.

In presenting Berliner's suspension Thursday afternoon, the organization told the editor he had failed to secure its approval for outside work for other news outlets, as is required of NPR journalists. It called the letter a "final warning," saying Berliner would be fired if he violated NPR's policy again. Berliner is a dues-paying member of NPR's newsroom union but says he is not appealing the punishment.

The Free Press is a site that has become a haven for journalists who believe that mainstream media outlets have become too liberal. In addition to his essay, Berliner appeared in an episode of its podcast Honestly with Bari Weiss.

A few hours after the essay appeared online, NPR chief business editor Pallavi Gogoi reminded Berliner of the requirement that he secure approval before appearing in outside press, according to a copy of the note provided by Berliner.

In its formal rebuke, NPR did not cite Berliner's appearance on Chris Cuomo's NewsNation program last Tuesday night, for which NPR gave him the green light. (NPR's chief communications officer told Berliner to focus on his own experience and not share proprietary information.) The NPR letter also did not cite his remarks to The New York Times , which ran its article mid-afternoon Thursday, shortly before the reprimand was sent. Berliner says he did not seek approval before talking with the Times .

NPR defends its journalism after senior editor says it has lost the public's trust

Berliner says he did not get permission from NPR to speak with me for this story but that he was not worried about the consequences: "Talking to an NPR journalist and being fired for that would be extraordinary, I think."

Berliner is a member of NPR's business desk, as am I, and he has helped to edit many of my stories. He had no involvement in the preparation of this article and did not see it before it was posted publicly.

In rebuking Berliner, NPR said he had also publicly released proprietary information about audience demographics, which it considers confidential. He said those figures "were essentially marketing material. If they had been really good, they probably would have distributed them and sent them out to the world."

Feelings of anger and betrayal inside the newsroom

His essay and subsequent public remarks stirred deep anger and dismay within NPR. Colleagues contend Berliner cherry-picked examples to fit his arguments and challenge the accuracy of his accounts. They also note he did not seek comment from the journalists involved in the work he cited.

Morning Edition host Michel Martin told me some colleagues at the network share Berliner's concerns that coverage is frequently presented through an ideological or idealistic prism that can alienate listeners.

"The way to address that is through training and mentorship," says Martin, herself a veteran of nearly two decades at the network who has also reported for The Wall Street Journal and ABC News. "It's not by blowing the place up, by trashing your colleagues, in full view of people who don't really care about it anyway."

Several NPR journalists told me they are no longer willing to work with Berliner as they no longer have confidence that he will keep private their internal musings about stories as they work through coverage.

"Newsrooms run on trust," NPR political correspondent Danielle Kurtzleben tweeted last week, without mentioning Berliner by name. "If you violate everyone's trust by going to another outlet and sh--ing on your colleagues (while doing a bad job journalistically, for that matter), I don't know how you do your job now."

Berliner rejected that critique, saying nothing in his essay or subsequent remarks betrayed private observations or arguments about coverage.

Other newsrooms are also grappling with questions over news judgment and confidentiality. On Monday, New York Times Executive Editor Joseph Kahn announced to his staff that the newspaper's inquiry into who leaked internal dissent over a planned episode of its podcast The Daily to another news outlet proved inconclusive. The episode was to focus on a December report on the use of sexual assault as part of the Hamas attack on Israel in October. Audio staffers aired doubts over how well the reporting stood up to scrutiny.

"We work together with trust and collegiality everyday on everything we produce, and I have every expectation that this incident will prove to be a singular exception to an important rule," Kahn wrote to Times staffers.

At NPR, some of Berliner's colleagues have weighed in online against his claim that the network has focused on diversifying its workforce without a concomitant commitment to diversity of viewpoint. Recently retired Chief Executive John Lansing has referred to this pursuit of diversity within NPR's workforce as its " North Star ," a moral imperative and chief business strategy.

In his essay, Berliner tagged the strategy as a failure, citing the drop in NPR's broadcast audiences and its struggle to attract more Black and Latino listeners in particular.

"During most of my tenure here, an open-minded, curious culture prevailed. We were nerdy, but not knee-jerk, activist, or scolding," Berliner writes. "In recent years, however, that has changed."

Berliner writes, "For NPR, which purports to consider all things, it's devastating both for its journalism and its business model."

NPR investigative reporter Chiara Eisner wrote in a comment for this story: "Minorities do not all think the same and do not report the same. Good reporters and editors should know that by now. It's embarrassing to me as a reporter at NPR that a senior editor here missed that point in 2024."

Some colleagues drafted a letter to Maher and NPR's chief news executive, Edith Chapin, seeking greater clarity on NPR's standards for its coverage and the behavior of its journalists — clearly pointed at Berliner.

A plan for "healthy discussion"

On Friday, CEO Maher stood up for the network's mission and the journalism, taking issue with Berliner's critique, though never mentioning him by name. Among her chief issues, she said Berliner's essay offered "a criticism of our people on the basis of who we are."

Berliner took great exception to that, saying she had denigrated him. He said that he supported diversifying NPR's workforce to look more like the U.S. population at large. She did not address that in a subsequent private exchange he shared with me for this story. (An NPR spokesperson declined further comment.)

Late Monday afternoon, Chapin announced to the newsroom that Executive Editor Eva Rodriguez would lead monthly meetings to review coverage.

"Among the questions we'll ask of ourselves each month: Did we capture the diversity of this country — racial, ethnic, religious, economic, political geographic, etc — in all of its complexity and in a way that helped listeners and readers recognize themselves and their communities?" Chapin wrote in the memo. "Did we offer coverage that helped them understand — even if just a bit better — those neighbors with whom they share little in common?"

Berliner said he welcomed the announcement but would withhold judgment until those meetings played out.

In a text for this story, Chapin said such sessions had been discussed since Lansing unified the news and programming divisions under her acting leadership last year.

"Now seemed [the] time to deliver if we were going to do it," Chapin said. "Healthy discussion is something we need more of."

Disclosure: This story was reported and written by NPR Media Correspondent David Folkenflik and edited by Deputy Business Editor Emily Kopp and Managing Editor Gerry Holmes. Under NPR's protocol for reporting on itself, no NPR corporate official or news executive reviewed this story before it was posted publicly.

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Guest Essay

Xi Thinks China Can Slow Climate Change. What if He’s Right?

By Jacob Dreyer

Mr. Dreyer, an editor and writer who focuses on the Chinese political economy and science, wrote from Shanghai.

At first glance, Xi Jinping seems to have lost the plot.

China’s president appears to be smothering the entrepreneurial dynamism that allowed his country to crawl out of poverty and become the factory of the world. He has brushed aside Deng Xiaoping’s maxim “To get rich is glorious” in favor of centralized planning and Communist-sounding slogans like “ ecological civilization ” and “ new, quality productive forces ,” which have prompted predictions of the end of China’s economic miracle.

But Mr. Xi is, in fact, making a decades-long bet that China can dominate the global transition to green energy, with his one-party state acting as the driving force in a way that free markets cannot or will not. His ultimate goal is not just to address one of humanity’s most urgent problems — climate change — but also to position China as the global savior in the process.

It has already begun. In recent years, the transition away from fossil fuels has become Mr. Xi’s mantra and the common thread in China’s industrial policies. It’s yielding results: China is now the world’s leading manufacturer of climate-friendly technologies, such as solar panels , batteries and electric vehicles . Last year the energy transition was China’s single biggest driver of overall investment and economic growth, making it the first large economy to achieve that.

This raises an important question for the United States and all of humanity: Is Mr. Xi right? Is a state-directed system like China’s better positioned to solve a generational crisis like climate change, or is a decentralized market approach — i.e., the American way — the answer?

How this plays out could have serious implications for American power and influence.

Look at what happened in the early 20th century, when fascism posed a global threat. America entered the fight late, but with its industrial power — the arsenal of democracy — it emerged on top. Whoever unlocks the door inherits the kingdom, and the United States set about building a new architecture of trade and international relations. The era of American dominance began.

Climate change is, similarly, a global problem, one that threatens our species and the world’s biodiversity. Where do Brazil , Pakistan , Indonesia and other large developing nations that are already grappling with the effects of climate change find their solutions? It will be in technologies that offer an affordable path to decarbonization, and so far, it’s China that is providing most of the solar panels , electric cars and more. China’s exports, increasingly led by green technology, are booming, and much of the growth involves exports to developing countries .

From the American neoliberal economic viewpoint, a state-led push like this might seem illegitimate or even unfair. The state, with its subsidies and political directives, is making decisions that are better left to the markets, the thinking goes.

But China’s leaders have their own calculations, which prioritize stability decades from now over shareholder returns today. Chinese history is littered with dynasties that fell because of famines, floods or failures to adapt to new realities. The Chinese Communist Party’s centrally planned system values constant struggle for its own sake, and today’s struggle is against climate change. China received a frightening reminder of this in 2022, when vast areas of the country baked for weeks under a record heat wave that dried up rivers , withered crops and was blamed for several heatstroke deaths.

China’s government knows that it must make this green transition out of rational self-interest or risk joining the Soviet Union on history’s scrap heap, and is actively positioning itself to do so. It is increasingly led by people with backgrounds in science, technology and environmental issues. Shanghai, the country’s largest city and its financial and industrial leading edge, is headed by Chen Jining, an environmental systems expert and China’s former minister of environmental protection. Across the country, money is being poured into developing and bringing to market new advances in things like rechargeable batteries and into creating corporate champions in renewable energy .

To be clear, for Mr. Xi, this green agenda is not purely an environmental endeavor. It also helps him tighten his grip on power. In 2015, for instance, the Central Environmental Inspection Team was formed to investigate whether provincial leaders and even agencies of the central government were adhering to his green push, giving him another tool with which to exert his already considerable power and authority.

At the same time, locking in renewable energy sources is a national security issue for Mr. Xi; unlike the United States, China imports almost all of its oil, which could be disrupted by the U.S. Navy in choke points like the Malacca Strait in the event of war.

Mr. Xi’s plan — call it his Green Leap Forward — has serious deficiencies. China continues to build coal-fired power plants , and its annual greenhouse-gas emissions remain far greater than those of the United States, though American emissions are higher on a per-capita basis. China’s electric vehicle industry was built on subsidies , and the country may be using forced labor to produce solar panels. Those are serious concerns, but they fade into the background when Pakistan floods or Brazil wants to build an E.V. factory or South Africa desperately needs solar panels for a faltering energy grid.

American politics may be inadvertently helping China gobble up global market share in renewable energy products. When the United States — whether for national security or protectionist reasons — keeps Chinese companies like Huawei out of the American market or rolls up the welcome mat for electric vehicle makers like BYD or companies involved in artificial intelligence or self-driving cars, those businesses must look elsewhere.

President Biden’s Inflation Reduction Act , aimed at tackling climate change, has put the United States on a solid path toward carbon neutrality. But America’s decentralization and focus on private innovation means government policy cannot have quite the same impact that it can in China.

So it is crucial for Americans to recognize that, for most of the world, perhaps for all of us, China’s ability to provide low-cost green technology is, on balance, great news. All of humanity needs to move toward renewables at a huge scale — and fast. America still leads in innovation, while China excels in taking frontier science and making its application in the real world cost-effective. If American politicians, investors and businesses recognize that climate change is humanity’s biggest threat, that could open pathways for diplomacy, collaboration and constructive competition with China that benefit us all.

Together, China and the United States could decarbonize the world. But if Americans don’t get serious about it, the Chinese will do it without them.

And if the United States tries to obstruct China, by way of corporate blacklists, trade or technology bans or diplomatic pressure, it will end up looking like part of the climate problem. That happened earlier this month when Treasury Secretary Janet Yellen, during a visit to China, urged officials here to rein in green technology exports that the United States says are hurting American companies.

Mr. Xi won’t completely toss out the polluting manufacturing-for-export economic model that has served China so well, nor does he seem ready to halt construction of coal plants. Both are considered necessary for economic and energy security until the green transition is complete. But they are now only a means to an end. The endgame, it seems, is to reach carbon neutrality while dominating the industries making that possible.

Much like how the United States showed up late for World War II, China’s clean-tech companies are latecomers, piggybacking on technology developed elsewhere. But history rewards not necessarily who was there first but who was there last — when a problem was solved. Mr. Xi seems to discern the climate chaos on the horizon. Winning the race for solutions means winning the world that comes next.

Jacob Dreyer is an American editor and writer focused on the intersection of the Chinese political economy and science. He lives in Shanghai.

The Times is committed to publishing a diversity of letters to the editor. We’d like to hear what you think about this or any of our articles. Here are some tips . And here’s our email: [email protected] .

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NPR suspends senior editor Uri Berliner after essay accusing outlet of liberal bias

Npr suspended senior editor uri berliner a week after he authored an online essay accusing the outlet of allowing liberal bias in its coverage..

NPR has suspended a senior editor who authored an essay published last week on an online news site in which he argued that the network had "lost America's trust" because of a liberal bias in its coverage, the outlet reported.

Uri Berliner was suspended Friday for five days without pay, NPR reported Tuesday . The revelation came exactly a week after Berliner publicly claimed in an essay for The Free Press, an online news publication, that NPR had allowed a "liberal bent" to influence its coverage, causing the outlet to steadily lose credibility with audiences.

The essay reignited the criticism that many prominent conservatives have long leveled against NPR and prompted newsroom leadership to implement monthly internal reviews of the network's coverage, NPR reported. Berliner's essay also angered many of his colleagues and exposed NPR's new chief executive Katherine Maher to a string of attacks from conservatives over her past social media posts.

In a statement Monday to NPR, Maher refuted Berliner's claims by underscoring NPR's commitment to objective coverage of national issues.

"In America everyone is entitled to free speech as a private citizen," Maher said. "What matters is NPR's work and my commitment as its CEO: public service, editorial independence, and the mission to serve all of the American public. NPR is independent, beholden to no party, and without commercial interests."

Heat exposure law: Florida joins Texas in banning local heat protections for outdoor workers

Berliner rails against NPR's coverage of COVID-19, diversity efforts

Berliner, a senior business editor who has worked at NPR for 25 years, argued in the Free Press essay that “people at every level of NPR have comfortably coalesced around the progressive worldview.”

While he claimed that NPR has always had a "liberal bent" ever since he was hired at the outlet, he wrote that it has since lost its "open-minded spirit," and, hence, "an audience that reflects America."

The Peabody Award-winning journalist highlighted what he viewed as examples of the network's partisan coverage of several major news events, including the origins of COVID-19 and the war in Gaza . Berliner also lambasted NPR's diversity, equity and inclusion (DEI) policies – as reflected both within its newsroom and in its coverage – as making race and identity "paramount in nearly every aspect of the workplace.”

"All this reflected a broader movement in the culture of people clustering together based on ideology or a characteristic of birth," he wrote.

Uri Berliner's essay fuels conservative attacks on NPR

In response to the essay, many prominent conservatives and Republicans, including former President Donald Trump, launched renewed attacks at NPR for what they perceive as partisan coverage.

Conservative activist Christopher Rufo in particular targeted Maher for messages she posted to social media years before joining the network – her  first at a news organization . Among the posts singled out were  a 2020 tweet that called Trump racist .

Trump reiterated on his social media platform, Truth Social, his longstanding argument that NPR’s government funding should be rescinded.

NPR issues formal rebuke to Berliner

Berliner provided an NPR reporter with a copy of the formal rebuke for review in which the organization told the editor he had not been approved to write for other news outlets, as is required of NPR journalists.

NPR also said he publicly released confidential proprietary information about audience demographics, the outlet reported.

Leadership said the letter was a "final warning" for Berliner, who would be fired for future violations of NPR's policies, according to NPR's reporting. Berliner, who is a dues-paying member of NPR's newsroom union, told the NPR reporter that he is not appealing the punishment.

A spokeswoman for NPR said the outlet declined to comment on Berliner's essay or the news of his suspension when reached Tuesday by USA TODAY.

"NPR does not comment on individual personnel matters, including discipline," according to the statement. "We expect all of our employees to comply with NPR policies and procedures, which for our editorial staff includes the NPR Ethics Handbook ."

NPR staffer express dismay; leadership puts coverage reviews in place

According to the NPR article, Berliner's essay also invoked the ire of many of his colleagues and the reporters whose stories he would be responsible for editing.

"Newsrooms run on trust," NPR political correspondent Danielle Kurtzleben said in a post last week on social media site X, though he didn't mention Berliner by name. "If you violate everyone's trust by going to another outlet and [expletive] on your colleagues (while doing a bad job journalistically, for that matter), I don't know how you do your job now."

Amid the fallout, NPR reported that NPR's chief news executive Edith Chapin announced to the newsroom late Monday afternoon that Executive Editor Eva Rodriguez would lead monthly meetings to review coverage.

Berliner expressed no regrets about publishing the essay in an interview with NPR, adding that he tried repeatedly to make his concerns over NPR's coverage known to news leaders.

"I love NPR and feel it's a national trust," Berliner says. "We have great journalists here. If they shed their opinions and did the great journalism they're capable of, this would be a much more interesting and fulfilling organization for our listeners."

Eric Lagatta covers breaking and trending news for USA TODAY. Reach him at [email protected]