FELLOW SPOTLIGHT: CATHERINE HEADEN
CATHERINE HEADEN
Independent Design Contractor, Chair of Norton Cultural Council
Region: Bristol County
Photo Credit: Amy Parker of Woods Creative
The 2023-2024 Advocacy and Organizing Fellowship cohort is a collective of arts and culture leaders, practitioners, and activists from different and distinct communities across Massachusetts. While they spend the year incubating and implementing plans to address the unique needs of local or statewide creative communities, MASSCreative is proud to share their reflections on their projects and learnings.
This reflection is offered by Advocacy and Organizing Fellow Catherine Headen. Catherine is an independent design contractor and serves as the Chair of the Norton Cultural Council in Bristol County.
It started out with a simple enough idea…..
Last year, one of my favorite people introduced a new word to me: “voluntold.”
She was telling me about how when she was a kid in the 80’s, her mother would force her to co-pilot all kinds of projects, including wearing a bright red silky blood drop costume (complete with red tights and a pointy red silk hat with an elastic chin strap) in local parades and at blood drives for the Florida Georgia Blood Alliance (a local blood bank). She seemed not to enjoy it at all, whereas I immediately wished I could have also worn a blood drop costume! Since her time as a blood drop, she has become an epically incredible volunteer (much like her mother), leading many, many projects, including a diaper drive for the City of Chelsea during COVID, and currently as a CASA here in the Boston area.
Before our conversation, I had never really had a word for the idea that some people were dragged, forced into volunteering. I always considered it to be possibly dreaded at first by a reluctant teenager or someone doing community service as a punishment, but generally, I assumed that everyone liked volunteering and never considered it to be a forced act. But, man, that word alone perfectly encapsulated exactly what I had seen and felt for years as a volunteer, both as a team member and leader: the vast majority of people do not want to volunteer (or, like my friend, not when the ask comes from parents, bosses, or authority figures).
I, on the other hand, struggle to narrow down which volunteer projects to focus my time on. Like a lot of people, each year I try and do a reflection and think about what events meant the most to me over the past twelve months. Inevitably, the volunteer organizations and projects I have participated in are the most rewarding. It turns out that feeling of satisfaction is not unique to me: volunteerism and acts of community are the easiest ways to find fulfillment in life. Something about the act of giving your time and energy to other people makes us feel more connected to one another and has other positive health outcomes as well.
So what’s going on here? Am I the outlier? Are the “voluntolds” the outliers? With these questions comes a broader context. Despite all of the positive feelings I associate with volunteering, I’ve also really struggled with why so many of the organizations that mean so much to me are challenged in attracting (and retaining!) members, particularly people who are interested in a multi-year commitment. It’s fairly straightforward, although not always an easy task, to find people for one-off events, but when it comes to converting those participants into a deeper relationship, I struggled to find many helpful resources to help me better support the organizations I care about with enough people to power their initiatives.
The two volunteer organizations I work with most closely, The Norton Cultural Council and AIGA Boston, both see this issue in different ways. AIGA Boston typically has a lot of volunteers for events, but leadership attrition is always a concern, and finding people to host or lead events can be a challenge. The Norton Cultural Council, similar to Local Cultural Councils of similar size, often struggles for community recognition and, probably interconnectedly, struggles to maintain a minimum five-person membership. Both organizations speak directly to the health and morale of the communities they represent and support. If they can’t retain volunteers, it is not a positive indicator of things to come.
“I had been searching for a way to tackle the problems of understanding how to make volunteer organizations more successful when the MASSCreative Fellowship announcement came along. This opportunity dovetailed quite nicely with the problem I was trying to address in related contexts: how do we keep volunteers happily engaged in an organization for more than just a few days or a single event? How do we turn interest into a lifelong commitment to advocating for the organizations and issues we care about in a sustainable way?”
To address one of the many elephants in the room: should we continue to rely on volunteer efforts to fuel these highly meaningful events and organizations? Of course, it would be ideal to be able to make sure everyone is fiscally compensated for their time, but unfortunately, many worthwhile causes do not have the budgets to run without heavy (if not exclusive) reliance on talented volunteers. We could all just stop volunteering, but I think the outcomes would be pretty dire. From first responder squads to caregivers, to municipal officers, to artists, our economies and community health are deeply intertwined and reliant on volunteer efforts.
Volunteerism is also a great way to achieve personal growth and skills building, as many volunteer projects allow for greater flexibility when it comes to prerequisites and requirements. I’ve found less red tape attached to volunteer work, as most organizations simply want positive progress and are happy to support people who want to put in the effort to make something happen. You are able to take bigger risks in terms of event concepts than you may be in a more corporate environment, not to mention all of the members of the community you get to meet and connect with. In a time when people are struggling to build meaningful relationships, volunteerism has provided a great excuse for get-togethers, dinners, and celebrations with people who have a shared interest or goal.
With all this as background, I set out to see how I, over the following year, could better solve the problem of attracting and retaining volunteers for any organization looking to grow.
OTHER BASELINE ASSUMPTIONS AND PROBLEMS TO SOLVE
Right now, I am operating under a basic (and possibly flawed) assumption that most organizations are similar to the ones that I’ve worked with; mostly fueled by a few die-hard committed people (who seem to volunteer everywhere!) with the occasional people who float in and out of projects. And if that is the case, how do we avoid burnout?
If better guidelines and toolkits were available to both the individual and the organization, can we increase the number and longevity of volunteers overall?
Time alone can’t be the problem. Although often cited as a reason not to volunteer, no one has enough time. Ever. How can we remove time as a barrier and make sure that investing the precious time we do have available feels rewarding and engaging?
Is this really a problem of good civics? I wonder if this was even really a problem 40 or 50 years ago when participation in the community was more expected, either due to participation in religious organizations or from some other municipal-led source?
PROJECT DELIVERABLES
A digital toolkit with suggested steps and guidelines for onboarding and maintaining volunteer interest. This will include sample surveys and checklists that will be free and open to the public.
In addition to creating a toolkit, I am launching a 100-day project with the focus of volunteer attraction and retention. I’ve always enjoyed the act of tackling a problem for 100 consecutive days, and the 100-day project is the perfect context to give me a boost. I’m looking to start my project on May 1st.
STEPS SO FAR
This fellowship has so far provided many helpful tools for me to get my arms around a better initial problem statement and how to go about setting a reasonable goal for the next year (with possible insights into how to move this further along post the fellowship cycle). We've heard from a lot of great speakers and presenters. Some standout messages are:
Embrace the power of a one-on-one meeting (as presented by Raven Robinson of PR2Polictics). I’ve been a working professional for decades now and although the most dramatic conversations have often taken place in larger groups, I can’t get over how important it is to get in the weeds and connect with people on a particular problem. The intimacy of the context unlocks so much room for expression and exploration. But remember….
When going into a meeting, have definitive questions and purpose. I love talking with people about pretty much anything, but I have become much, much better through my job as a designer and life experience at extracting seemingly mundane questions and responses into actionable ideas from a conversation. Even with that said, I always make sure to leave at least 10 minutes to start talking about the initial problem that made me come to them in the first place.
Think creatively about how to turn your challenge into a campaign (inspired by the work at The Center for Artistic Activism). For me, this is a particularly difficult thing to do, BUT when done well is magical. Everyone loves to feel like they are experiencing something special. It's also helpful when that special feeling is connected to something that causes the audience to completely reconsider the meaning and context of their initial approach. I have to think carefully about how to craft better campaigns around the issues that matter to me. Ultimately, what does a campaign for volunteerism look like? How do you break through and catch someone's attention long enough to make them consider your cause with dedication and interest? Which leads me to…
Know your audience. Based on my initial problem statement, my audience may be too broad. It is also constantly shifting, where in one situation, you may be a leader and, in another, an informed constituent. Which then led me to…
There are different levels of participation (inspired by Sarah Horsley of Rising Sun Consulting for Progressive Social Change). Be very careful of assuming that everyone has the same interests when joining. Make sure you know who wants to be informed through social media or a newsletter versus who wants to be an event volunteer versus a leader. That led me to the question…
How do you coach (coax?) people into leadership positions? In some ways, I think we culturally place too much value on developing leadership skills, but I am starting to see that in many areas, we need to do a better job of identifying talent and growing those leaders from within the organization. That is a skill in and of itself because you have to check your ego and not push too hard while, at the same time, nudge people to go outside their comfort zone.
Know the hubs and the spokes. It amazes me how some people seem to know everyone. Everyone. Finding and connecting with those people is invaluable. They will help you recruit for new initiatives and generally make life much more bearable.
WHERE ARE WE NOW?
For those who are unaware, I participated in a kickoff event with other members of the cohort, where I got to understand what their initial ideas for projects are and understand a bit more about ourselves as people, particularly how we tend to flex and mold ourselves in a broader organizational system. I participate in bi-weekly meetings where we either have lectures and workshops focused on a particular topic or work on defining and redefining our projects in a smaller group setting. All in all, I work on my project about 20 hours a month at the moment, and I anticipate an uptick in that amount based on where I want my project to go.
The good news is that I think my original hypothesis is going in the right direction. Based on conversations with 10 different people, everyone is encountering volunteer recruitment issues in some way, shape, or form. No one has access to or was given any resources specific to volunteering. I still want to do more formal surveying to understand exactly where the pain points are.
Overwhelmingly, people seem interested in the topic regardless of industry or context. This is going to be helpful in my testing process as it will be easier to recruit people for feedback and easier for them to give useful feedback because it can apply to their context. I could shift the focus to “scalable volunteerism in arts advocacy,” but in this case, I’m not sure the specificity helps to create a better outcome.
The virtual sessions and workshops are extremely valuable and well-timed. Some of this information isn’t new to me (like how to craft a social media campaign), but other topics, like the difference between advocacy and activism, are helpful to consider, especially since, as in all industries, language matters and knowing what word means what in this context is extremely valuable.
I’m ready to move forward with my survey crafting and interview scheduling. I’d love to have both qualitative and quantitative data to present in my final assessment for the year, so getting a survey going and interviewing 10-15 people is my first foray into getting the information I want. The trick is that I need feedback from both leaders and members since I am trying to improve the experience for both.
I definitely want to find existing data on volunteerism trends and patterns overall. I’m hoping to find more information on the financial impact of satisfied volunteers and the effect of volunteerism on community stability. It may be a bit of a stretch, but I’m hoping to demonstrate that solving this problem can lead to not only happier people, but a more financially stable community. I also want to see if I can confirm what I assume the demographics of volunteers look like today (is it really only for the very young and very old? Is it really tilting more towards one gender or the other?)
THE FUTURE IS BRIGHT
I am very optimistic that this project is going to have useful, informative results. Although I’m certainly not trying to put the cart before the horse, I’ve never come across a toolkit that in some way I didn’t find useful, and I’m hoping that mine will continue to build on a narrative that is crucial to community and personal health. I want to see a future where volunteers don’t feel lost, confused, and underappreciated. I want everyone to know that their time is valuable and that they are doing a tremendous service by using precious time for issues that matter. I can personally attest to the vast amount of new experiences that have been opened to me as a direct result of being more involved in the communities and issues that matter to me. In the best way possible, the world seems smaller, less scary, and more importantly, I can better see how I can also be a positive change agent.
