The first thing to know is that a volunteer organization is not a foundation. The difference is in the meanings and directions of work. Foundations help with resources. We, in turn, are tailored in order to give human help and presence. We do not treat or replace someone’s professional help. A volunteer organization gives some people the opportunity to share their warmth, and other people – our wards, gives the opportunity to receive this warmth. We stand, as it were, over this meeting, over this process and organize it. And since this process is delicate and fragile, it requires special skills and special logic. Probably, we can say that we are a donation of friendship, human support, human participation, good mood.
Sometimes from the outside they think, why the organization? Go to the hospital and there is no need to philosophize. However, only an organization can provide responsible, long-term and stable work! Scattered volunteers cannot do this. Yes, besides, hospitals and orphanages themselves prefer to work with organizations. And it is right.
When a person does something on his own initiative, it is very good, but not enough for long. Let me explain with an example. Why do people go to sports clubs? Because there is a coach, a get-together, a professional platform. Not everyone has the strength to go in for sports alone. In order to achieve professional, and even more or less serious, success – be it sports or charity, you need to attach yourself to a professional community where there are like-minded people, where they will help you, where they will develop the necessary skills, support your motivation, and teach. It’s always easier when there are people around you with whom you can share your interests.
A volunteer organization is necessarily a structure. The large “underwater” part of our “iceberg” is not visible from the side. We are judged by what volunteers do in hospitals or orphanages or elsewhere. And this is good. But I would like to be understood better and to know that for the operation of our entire mechanism of a volunteer organization of 20 groups and seven hundred people, we need a large team of two dozen employees who work seriously.
When you talk about business, about any company, then almost everyone understands that the above are mandatory components of an organization. But when it comes to us – a charitable volunteer organization, it takes a long time to explain that we are not a hobby group, but a professional community.
Volunteer organization, precisely because it has a standard organization, as in a business. But, at the same time, other principles and mechanisms operate in it. The main difference is that we work with volunteers, each of whom comes to the volunteer group of his own free will, he does not owe anything to anyone – this is pure freedom. The main question that a volunteer organization solves is: how to build something systemic, long-term, responsible out of pure freedoms? How to make sure that a person who has his own unique motivation unites around a good deed with other people? And at the same time, the business would be constant without failure, it would grow and widen.
How can the process be set up without the help of awards, career, corporate culture and other standard motivational things? We know the answer. This is our know-how.
The secret of the volunteer movement is in the people themselves, in the leadership of the movement and the coordinators of volunteer groups and in the space of human and working relationships that they create. The management team is the people with whom the volunteers can open up and realize their motivation, that is, self-actualize. The secret, of course, is that we are doing a good deed together. As a result, the volunteers do not so much solve the tasks that we set before them, as they themselves choose what to do. A specific hospital and its patients attract volunteers, but we do not distribute them there.
An important difference between a volunteer organization and a business is in purpose and sense. It is impossible to compare making money with meeting children in an orphanage. When a child who only rides in a stroller, who does not speak, but every time saying goodbye to you just hugs you and smiles, then you understand everything. And, for me, for example, no careers and businesses and earnings can stand side by side.
