152 – What Every Nonprofit Executive Should Know About Community Engagement

March 6, 2025

Episode #152: What Every Nonprofit Executive Should Know About Community Engagement 

In this episode, Tobi draws insights from the Volunteer Management Progress Report and discusses the perennial challenges in engaging volunteers, particularly respect and buy-in from leadership. She highlights the importance of power sharing, diverse community engagement activities, and the skill sets needed for successful community collaborations. 

Tobi also shares practical tips from listening forums and advocacy campaigns to digital engagement and strategic planning, that can transform your organization’s relationship with its community. This episode is perfect for executive directors and program leaders looking for actionable strategies to build meaningful, lasting partnerships! 

Community Engagement – Episode Highlights

• [00:52] – Understanding Community Engagement 
• [02:16] – Challenges in Community Engagement 
• [05:02] – Defining Community and Volunteer Roles 
• [09:30] – Power Sharing in Community Engagement 
• [24:13] – Practical Ways to Engage the Community 
• [32:28] – Skills for Effective Community Engagement 

Helpful Links

• VolunteerPro Impact Lab Community 
• 2025 Volunteer Management Progress Report – The Recruitment Edition  
• Volunteer Nation Episode #148 – Nonprofit Advocacy 101 – Yes You Can! 
• Volunteer Nation Episode #149 – Nonprofit Advocacy Strategies – A Checklist 
• Volunteer Nation Episode #127 – Volunteer Centric, Community Centric, Organization Centric: What’s the Difference? 
• Results.org 

Contact Us

Have questions or suggestions for the show? Email us at wecare@volpro.net.

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Episode #152 Transcript: What Every Nonprofit Executive Should Know About Community Engagement 

Tobi: Hey, welcome to the volunteer nation podcast, bringing you practical tips and big ideas on how to build, grow, and scale volunteer talent. I’m your host, Tobi Johnson. And if you rely on volunteers to fuel your charity cause membership or movement, I made this podcast just for you. Well, hello, everybody. I hope your week’s going well. 

here in East Tennessee. The weather is starting to warm up. We’re starting to see signs of spring. The daffodils are blooming. We are seeing sunshine. The earth is warming up. I’m kind of excited about it. So, I hope where you are, you’re enjoying some good weather as well. I just love spring. It’s one of my favorite seasons. 

Everything’s new and fresh. Uh, but. But today, I thought I would talk about what every nonprofit executive should know about community engagement. This is a long title for a topic that I’ve wanted to talk about for a while now, but I was really struck by some of the results in our recent volunteer management progress report, the Recruitment Edition. 

We surveyed over a thousand nonprofits about how they engage the community and their good causes, and we found that one out of ten respondents noted respect and buy in as their top challenge when it came to engaging community volunteers and This isn’t anything new. It’s been going on now because I’ve been doing the survey for a decade. 

This challenge comes up every single year. And I just wondered if there was some light, I could share on this to help executives, in particular executive directors, program directors, anyone who is overseeing departments that are engaged in community or want to engage the community in their work, especially at the organizational level. 

And respect and buying in is a top challenge. Yes, it was down 1 percent from last year, which isn’t much, but buy in, indifference, or active resistance to volunteer initiatives from executive leadership, program leads, and coworkers was a continued and perennial challenge for leaders of volunteers in our survey. 

Many noted a lack of understanding and investment, as well as strategic direction for the volunteer enterprise. from their top leadership. Now, this is an issue, I think, because whatever the top leadership does in an organization, the rest of the organization follows that lead, and it creates a culture for that organization. 

And if you are in one of those organizations, I want to talk about community engagement in general today, and hopefully you can get some tips. Now, maybe you’re an organization that understands volunteers, respects volunteer, knows that you are engaging them in the right ways, and you’re working with the community. 

Or maybe you’re in an organization where you’re not so sure about that. I just want to talk in a way that can help any executive leader in understanding the wide range of community engagement activities, including volunteerism, and maybe give you some takeaway tips that can help improve how you’re connecting with the community. 

Because I just don’t think in today’s world we can get away with living in a hermetically sealed organization where we are not bringing in the community in some way to advise what we’re doing. I mean, obviously, volunteers are important, but I think community members in general, and I’ll talk about that a little bit. 

I just finished doing a three-part series on the podcast on nonprofit advocacy, and I talked about what are all the different advocacy activities that nonprofits can get involved in. And all of those were driven by community members, specifically volunteers. And if we’re not that out there advocating for our nonprofits and our sector, who will? 

And when decisions are made by lawmakers and stakeholders about who to fund and about what to fund, we’ve got to make sure that the community is there as our champions. And so today I want to talk about if you’ve decided, maybe you listened to those episodes on advocacy and you thought, well, that’s great, but how do I engage the community? 

This. episode is also for you. So, let’s talk about community engagement first to kick off, that it really spans several activities, including volunteerism. Of course, volunteerism is a keystone, a major part of community engagement. But let’s talk about the definition, because there are so many definitions of community engagement. 

I want to make sure we’re on the same page. Community engagement. is the process of working collaboratively with community members to address issues that affect their wellbeing, and at the same time, strengthens the effectiveness of a nonprofit’s programs and support. So, for me, when I say community engagement, I’m talking about a mutually beneficial partnership. 

It involves building relationships, fostering trust, and encouraging active participation in decision making, problem solving, and collective action. At its core, community engagement is about bringing the community voice into your organization. It’s about fostering long term connections, listening to your community’s needs, and ensuring their voices are heard and valued. 

And in this world where We are concerned about equity. We’re concerned about diversity. We’re concerned about making sure there’s a level playing field. If you’re someone that’s concerned by those things, community engagement is an absolute must for creating. Equity and getting diverse perspectives. So, let’s talk about what we mean by community. 

That’s a big word, it could mean a lot. For me, community engagement and the communities that you engage could be your neighborhood around your brick-and-mortar nonprofit. Could be your client base, the people you serve, your service beneficiaries. It could be your volunteers, your board even, although your board should be engaged, but your rank-and-file volunteers as well, or other people who care about your work. 

So, for your organization, when you think about the next steps around community engagement, the first step is to decide, well, what do we mean by community and which community right now are we planning on engaging? In the context of nonprofit volunteers, community engagement really means involving volunteers in meaningful ways to create a shared sense of purpose. 

It’s not just about recruiting and engaging volunteers in work for us. Community engagement goes beyond that, goes beyond just recruiting volunteers to fill shifts. It’s about including them in ways that honor their expertise and lived experiences. in program design as well as involving them in decisions that affect them directly. 

It’s really getting volunteers involved in working on your programs, helping you make decisions about things that impact on them. But I also think they are valuable. They offer valuable insights into your programs, especially the volunteers who are working in those programs. Day in and day out, they can see things sometimes that you can’t because they are intimately involved, especially volunteers that are coming every week or every month. 

Effective community engagement is about four different activities in general. One is listening in dialogue, so understanding community needs and perspectives of whatever community you’re trying to work with, collaboration, partnering with individuals and groups for shared goals, empowerment, giving people the tools and opportunities to act. 

It’s not just getting advice. It also involving people in creating and co-creating solutions and making those solutions happen. And then sustainability. It’s about creating long lasting, impactful relationships. So this is beyond and not, and sort of the antithesis of transactional relationships with our community. 

We expect in community engagement that we will continue to have ongoing relationships with the people we’re involved. So that’s a little bit about what community engagement is all about from my perspective. Different people have different perspectives, but I think this is a very healthy and proactive type of way of thinking about community engagement. 

The thing about community engagement is that it requires power sharing as well. And this is where some organizations just can’t get past that. And there are so many benefits to power sharing. Community engagement, when power is shared, can be a force multiplier. More people and resources working towards shared goals. 

However, it requires mutual accountability and benefits for everyone who is partnering in the collaboration. When you engage the community in helping to shape your work, you must be willing to give up long held beliefs or systems. Because often the community that you are engaging with will tell you, hey, this doesn’t work, if they’re being honest, and if you have a healthy relationship and a positive collaboration. 

Power sharing and community engagement means ensuring that decision making authority, resources and influence are distributed equitably amongst all stakeholders. So, this is different than being controlled by a single entity like your nonprofit or institution. And it really requires that you check frequently to ensure that those equitable exchanges are honored. 

This is really where organizations stop in their tracks sometimes. Because they realize, oh wow, to really realize the promise of deep community engagement, we have to not only be able to listen and change based on what the community tells us, but we also need to distribute resources, authority, and influence on the people we’re collaborating with. 

So, it does ring, it really, if your organization is very top down, very command and control, very old school management, then this is a leap. And I won’t say it’s easy, but there are huge benefits. There are so many ways that power can be shared. more effectively. I want to give you some examples because you’re probably wondering, what does that mean? 

I’m not sure what power sharing means. Well, there are lots of different ways and it doesn’t mean you have to share every bit of power, but you can start small and see how it goes. Because when I’ve worked in environments where people are on a level playing field, so much more can get done. Of course, we have expectations of one another. 

We have standards, mutual agreements. There’s, it’s not that it’s free for all, it’s that we agree to a certain way of working together. So, let’s talk about different ways to show shared power effectively. One is shared decision making so different. Activities around shared decision making might be community led committees and advisory boards where folks can have a direct role in shaping policies and programs. 

Certainly, if you have a volunteer program, having a volunteer advisory board just makes total sense. Participatory budgeting is also an interesting way of shared decision making, allowing people to help decide how resources and funding are allocated. I find that fascinating. I would love to be part of something like that. 

Shared decision making around consensus. building and co creation. So, using collective approaches where community members shape initiatives from the very start. So maybe it’s about deciding that there’s a problem, agreeing there’s a specific problem, but working with communities to decide how to handle that problem, what initiatives might be put together to create that problem. 

I remember back in the day I did training with self-directed volunteer teams and that is the model for self-directed volunteer teams is to present a business case or an issue brief and then have an independent volunteer team decide how they’re going to address that specific community problem. The second way of power sharing can be access, sharing accesses to resources and information. 

So just making sure there’s equitable funding and grants, providing direct financial support for grassroots organizations and maybe residents. led or neighborhood led initiatives. Knowledge and data sharing is another way. Making research reports, key decision-making data accessible and understandable. So, becoming fully transparent about how decisions are made at the organization is a way of sharing power. 

Another way is capacity building and leadership training. So, investing in developing the skills and knowledge of your local community so that they can become better leaders. So that’s also offering, sharing power and offering accesses, access to information and skill building. A third way of sharing power is through shifting leadership and representation. 

And I know a lot of organizations are interested in having diverse workforces, so that’s part of it, but it’s not all of it. So let’s talk about these different ideas. One is hiring and elevating community leaders. So, recruit staff, board members, and volunteers from within the community that you serve. 

So, can clients be volunteers? I think so. Of course, it takes structure, but there’s a way to make it happen. I remember when I started a, built a, employment and training program for young people back in the day, and our funding and my goals were to hire only people from the community that our clients came from. 

We had specific geographic areas in our city. And those were the places that I went to look for staff, and I hired about 20 staff members, and almost, I would say, 75 percent of them lived in the communities or came from the communities that our young people did as well. There’s also, in terms of shifting leadership and representation and power sharing, centering community voices, so ensuring that those directly affected by an issue are leading the conversations in storytelling around how that issue impacts people, what things have worked, what hasn’t. So, when the organization takes on a new element of their mission, they’re making sure they’re touching base with people in the community. Another one is decentralized leadership models. This is also a very fascinating way to share power. 

Using structures like cooperative leadership, rotating leadership roles, or shared governance is something that folks can use to share power. And it’s not unheard of, and it’s a growing trend that organizations have co executive directors. And so, it would be interesting to see an organization that has an executive, co-executive directors where one comes from the community. 

Or, finding ways to flatten leadership rather than using a hierarchical model. So that’s one way you can, that’s another way you can share power. A fourth way of sharing power is mutual accountability and transparency. So really making sure there are open communication channels so that there’s two-way feedback and where the community can hold the organization accountable and can offer feedback without fear of retribution. 

Just keeping those lines of communication open, regular reflection and adaptation, so being willing to shift priorities and walk the talk of true collaboration, helpful for power sharing. And then public commitment and follow through, clearly outlining how power will be shared and track progress openly. 

So being transparent, these are the areas where we’re going to share power with the community. The fifth way is, I think, such an interesting way of sharing power that really should be part of our volunteer experiences already, if they’re not, and that is recognition of lived experience as expertise. 

Community driven solutions that value lived experience as equally important as professional expertise when shaping programs. So really looking at what knowledge and networks somebody has that may be more suited to solving the problem than someone who has. a master’s degree, a social work degree from a university in another state, right? 

There is, lived experience is highly valuable. Storytelling and testimonies, so recognize, recognizing that lived experience, providing platforms for people to share their experiences in ways that influence policy and practice. So, it’s not just storytelling. for communications messaging, for recruiting volunteers using storytelling to raise awareness of programs or show client support for your work. 

This is storytelling to influence policy and practices at an organization. So, it’s a very specific way of using storytelling. And then one other way is compensating community contributors, so paying or offering stipends to those who provide expertise, speak, or contribute labor to initiatives. So there’s lots of conversation about the emotional work of volunteers and specifically in employee based volunteering or employee based support groups or affinity groups within a businesses where a community of practice or an affinity group would be led or is led by a particular person or group of people within that group, that particular sub community kind of, of the organization of employees. 

And there’s discussion about, well, if they’re doing this extra work, shouldn’t they be paid for it? And their expertise and lived expertise around this thing should be, whether it’s members of a, maybe they’re LGBTQ maybe they are part of a specific ethnic or racial group, maybe they’re young professionals. 

Whatever group of folks are coming together, there’s discussion about, well, isn’t this, should this be volunteer or should this be paid? So that’s something that volunteers involving organizations in the nonprofit space need to struggle with and grapple with. When does the expertise get to a point where it should be paid in order to be equitable? 

This is something that I’m not a huge fan of paying a lot of stipends to volunteers because it becomes a different, once a person is paid, they are no longer in their mind a volunteer in a lot of ways. It changes the relationship between the organization and the volunteer, but there are times to grapple with this. 

Sticky subject around remuneration when we’re talking about equity and we’re talking about people’s lived experiences and we’re talking about power sharing. So, it’s just something to have a conversation about. It’s not, there’s no simple solution. There’s no one size fits all. But when it comes to power sharing, it may be an action that you decide to take with a specific purpose. 

So, let’s take a pause right now for a quick break for my tips on what every nonprofit executive should know about community engagement. And when we get back, I want to talk about different ways to engage the community, depending on your organization’s goals. goals. I hope this has been helpful so far. It may make you a little nervous, but that’s good. If we’re not a little nervous, we’re not growing, right? All right, we will be right back after the break.  

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If you’re volpro.net/join and we’ll share how to get started and what’s involved. 

Okay, we’re back with more community engagement tips for nonprofit executives. I’m your host, Tobi Johnson. And of course, before the break, we talked about power sharing and what is community engagement and who are the communities we’re serving and engaging. 

Now I want to shift. Gears and really talk practically about what are the specific ways we might engage the community in addition to volunteer involvement. Volunteer involvement is the most obvious choice for community engagement, but nonprofits can engage communities through various activities that can build relationships, trust, and shared purpose, and you can really get more done and in more, in a more informed way if it’s. 

You know, if it’s managed properly, again, it’s not free for all engaging communities. There is a structure to what we’re doing. But let’s talk about these four high impact activities that you might use to engage the community at your nonprofit. One is listening and collaboration. So, specifically under listening and collaboration, you might set up community forums and town halls to host open discussions and gather input on community needs. 

Often, for example, service state service commissions will go on a listening tour throughout their state when they’re building their state plan and hear from different stakeholders about engaging the community and what communities need. So that’s a really fantastic way. To get quick information. They don’t take a lot of time. 

Surveys and focus groups are another way to collect feedback to shape programs and services. Partnering with local organizations, collaborating with businesses, schools, faith-based groups can give you a broader perspective and even create broader impact.  

So, listening and collaboration are great ways to the community involved in your work. A second big high impact area is advocacy and awareness. And of course, I’m a big fan of advocacy. I did a three, three series, three podcast episodes series on it. 

Episode 148 – Nonprofit Advocacy 101. Yes, You Can 

Episode 149 – Nonprofit Advocacy Strategies – A Checklist 

Episode 150 – Launch a Community-based Advocacy Program in Six Steps 

So, when you’re ready to do advocacy, we’ve got you covered. So, let’s talk about public awareness campaigns, which are one type of advocacy and awareness. So, educating the community on issues through social media, newsletters, and events. 

Another advocacy and awareness type activity for community engagement is policy advocacy. So, working with local leaders to push for policies that benefit the community directly. And how do you know they benefit the community? Because the community has told you, right? And then storytelling and testimony. 

So, amplifying voices by sharing those real-life stories. of impact and change and struggle and transformation from the people that you’re collaborating with and sharing those with decision makers. A third high impact area of community engagement is education and skill building. So, you don’t, a lot of people don’t think of education and skill building as a community engagement activity, but it is. 

It’s a way for us to build capacity together and grow together. So you can develop training programs that provide learning opportunities on relevant topics like financial literacy, health, leadership, advocacy, public speaking, all the things If you want to take your community engagement to the next level that everybody needs to have as a baseline leadership development programs to help community members build their leadership skills. 

Because if you want people involved in leadership, sometimes a little extra bit of leadership development can help them feel more confident. Not everybody is a born leader and there are a variety of ways and styles of leadership which I think we must be careful when we’re doing leadership development that we don’t create and prescribe something that isn’t sensitive and understands that there are diverse perspectives and perhaps diverse styles at play in our communities. 

So, it’s not about a cookie cutter approach, but it is about helping our community members feel confident, right, in and accept it as leaders. I think that’s one of the main things that people don’t step up if they don’t believe they’re going to be respected. A third area is facilitation workshops, so training community members on how to help you implement community engagement initiatives. 

So, your community engagement can be fueled by a community engagement team that is from the community. Great volunteer role, great way to ensure those diverse perspectives. So that’s our fourth area of high impact activities for community engagement. For more on combining leadership and volunteerism, check out Volunteer Nation episode 151, where I talk about reimagining nonprofit membership and volunteer engagement with Alice Glenn from the Junior League. 

She is fantastic and they are very good at combining volunteer engagement and leadership development. So check that episode, it was just recent, give you some ideas. Our fourth and final high impact way to engage the community is digital and media engagement. So, this could be social media takeovers where you’re letting community members share their experiences and insights on social media. 

Doing live Q& A sessions where you’re engaging people in discussion through live video or webinars Or community newsletters where you’re sharing updates success stories and opportunities for involvement I’m a huge fan of If you’re getting involved in community engagement in a real way of creating some type of communication tool where you can report back what’s happening in different areas, and you’re really an ice. 

Engage the community in creating it because once you start getting out and doing things, I like to say people are down on what they’re not up on, they will think it’s only lip service if you say we’re going to do community engagement and you go about doing community engagement but nobody hears about what’s happening. 

Then they don’t believe it’s happening, right? Everybody’s down, people are down on what they’re not up on. So, you need to keep people apprised. Any, all your stakeholders who are interested, or at the very least, include it in your regular, include some of these activities and what’s happening, and acknowledge community members who have stepped up in your regular, uh, your nonprofit’s regular newsletter. 

Make sure they’re on the subscription list. So, it’s clear what’s happening to everybody. And then, finally, I just want to note that successful community and volunteer engagement doesn’t happen by chance. It doesn’t happen by chance. Like I said, it’s not free for all. It takes a purposeful approach managed by skilled leaders. 

I think sometimes we just think, hey, let’s tap somebody on the shoulder. Hey, go out and let’s engage the community. It really is a skilled role. My very first My first job, my very first real job in nonprofits was working for a federal agency with a contractor that had a contract with a federal agency where I was the regional outreach coordinator for a six-state region. 

And basically, what I was doing was engaging the community. So, I had to learn a lot and fast about working with community and in community. It really requires a mix of interpersonal, strategic, and technical skills to build trust, foster collaboration, and create meaningful impact. So, I thought I’d also So, as the sort of last part of today’s episode, it’s just to talk about the skill set you’re looking for when it comes to community engagement. 

Because you as a nonprofit executive, if you’re listening, you also must think about who, which staff am I going to tap with this job, which team, or am I going to hire for this? What skills do they need to have? What skills do they need to be trained up on? So let’s just quickly go through a list of some things that you want to keep in mind when you’re figuring out how to staff your community engagement efforts. 

First thing, absolutely, hands down, it’s sort of obvious, right? Relationship building and communication. So, active listening, clear and inclusive communication, trust and rapport building. Just essential to be able to kick it off when trust isn’t given right away. Because imagine when you’re doing community engagement with a community that in the past may not have had the best relationship with your nonprofit or other nonprofits. So often, you’ve got to get through, work through some of these past challenges. A second skill set is cultural competency and inclusivity. Of course it is, right? When we’re engaging in community, diversity is generally part of. the picture. So cultural awareness, equity and inclusion, advocacy, making sure that all voices, especially marginalized voices, are valued and included. 

Adaptability. So, making sure that we’re able, our cultural competency is wrapped up in our ability to adapt. and make space for people with other different ways of being, right? That’s part of cultural competency. That sort of foundation of it, isn’t it? So, cultural competency inclusivity. A third area of skill set that you’re looking for staff to lead some of these efforts is facilitation and conflict resolution. 

So, meeting and workshop facilitation, Mediation and negotiation and emotional intelligence, these are things that, not all of this, sometimes, emotional intelligence is very difficult to teach, but it can be taught, but mediation and negotiation and media, meeting, meeting and workshop facilitation, absolutely can be taught. 

Some of this is instinct for some of us, as we grew up in our families, maybe we were the negotiator in our family, so we know how to do that, but, you know, I remember my first speaking gag, where I was reporting out my communications plan to a group of about 200 people, and my voice, I’ve told this story before, my voice dropped to really. 

I was so nervous. This is my plan for marketing. And people were like, what? What happened to you? You’re like a vibrant person. You’re outgoing. What’s going on? I said, I got nervous. If you see me on stage nowadays, you will never believe that I ever had an experience like that. Well, you know what? I learned how to present on stage. 

And through many meetings with many community partners, I learned how to have a conversation and set up, set the table for successful collaboration. That doesn’t just happen by chance. It happens through skill set. The fourth area for skills around community engagement is strategic thinking and problem solving. 

So, being able to do a needs assessment to identify gaps and opportunities, creative problem solving, and data driven decision making. So, not only collecting community feedback, but being able to analyze. It’s the information that you’re gathering. So strategic thinking, very important to skill set for community engagement. 

I’ve got three more skills that if you’re looking for the right person, I want you to consider when you’re doing community engagement initiatives. Leadership and empowerment. Another one, capacity building, so helping people develop skills, engaging in collaborative leadership, so being able to share power, to lead and follow, really important, and long term visioning, so being able to explain and communicate the vision for the future, not just what you’re trying to get done in the net here and now. 

So, really important, again, leadership can be learned. It’s not something we’re usually born with. We can learn it, and there are different styles and we don’t all have to be the loudest person in the room to lead, right? The sixth area of skill set around community engagement is digital and social media. 

skills, so online engagement, so, you know, really community engagement, using digital platforms to connect with and mobilize communities, storytelling and content creation, communicating through videos, blogs, social media, and tech literacy, really being able to use those virtual tools. So, people must be tech savvy, but I will put a pin in this one and say that you have a marketing and communications department or person, and your community engagement Um, staff or team can collaborate with that person or make that person part of that team. 

So not every, you, you don’t have to find a unicorn here. You can find a, a group, a team of people who have some of these skills and have people doing their best work. As part of your community engagement efforts, when we talk about this skill set, we’re not talking about finding someone who’s superhuman. 

It’s almost better to find a group of people, a team that could engage like this. So, find people with some of these skills. And then finally, advocacy and policy knowledge. This, for your entire team, is really important in understanding the community issues. So, understanding the bigger issues, academic research, the trends that are happening, and then also keeping track of what the community is telling you. 

So, that’s really important. Grassroots organizing skills, mobilizing people for civic action, policy changes, public community. So, being able to Cut an issue. So that’s basically cutting an issue is describing all aspects of an issue, why there’s a specific point of view that the organization is holding. 

And when we’re doing community engagement, we’re making sure that the community is vetted that the community. It’s something that we believe and that we have discussed with community members that we are engaging and that we have a collaborative understanding and approach and then public speaking and representation. 

So confidently being able to speak behalf of or So, Alongside our community. So, it’s not always that we’re going to be able to bring people with us. So, we have to be able to Speak in a way that shares the community’s interests without tokenizing that community There are other times where we can bring community members with us and then we want to step back and allow them to share their stories. 

So, there is a lot of skill set here. Remember that volunteer engagement is one way of engaging your community, but it’s not the only way. And if you’re going to do community engagement, make sure your team has some skill set. We have some training at Volunteer Pro that might help you if your team needs it. 

Help planning and implementing, um, a volunteer program renovation or creating a program from scratch, check out the volunteer pro impact lab. And I’ll put a link to the impact lab in the show notes. If you have team members who need basic skill building around volunteer engagement, which also translates to community engagement, check out our volunteer pro, volunteer management fundamentals online course. 

It is self-directed. Ten, eight, hours of fantastic fundamentals training across our volunteer strategy success path, which is our model. What we believe is the most important, is the most important, are the most important things you should be doing when you’re engaging your community as volunteers. 

And we offer generous discounts for teams, so check out those links in the show notes. I want to thank you for joining me today. I encourage you to engage your communities. The more successful, effective relationships with people in whatever communities you choose, the better off and the stronger and more sustainable your organization will be. 

Because the bigger your network, the stronger you are. It’s just, that’s the way it is. And the more people have a voice, the more interested they are in going to bat for you. These are basic human Elements, traits, principles, I don’t know what to call them, but I found throughout my 30 plus years in nonprofits that when I engage folks in meaningful relationship and decision making and power sharing, the sky’s the limit. 

So, I hope this has been helpful. If you’re interested and you like it, share it with a friend and join me next week. Same time, same place on the Volunteer Nation. Take care, everybody.