164 - Moving from Volunteer Compliance to Building Your Nonprofit Community

May 29, 2025

Episode #164: Moving from Volunteer Compliance to Building Your Nonprofit Community

In this episode of Volunteer Nation, Tobi Johnson unpacks a powerful mindset shift in the nonprofit world: moving beyond volunteer compliance and toward building a thriving volunteer community. 

Tobi explores the delicate balance between ensuring accountability and fostering genuine connection, trust, and shared purpose among your volunteers. Through real-world insights and practical examples, she contrasts the limiting effects of compliance-heavy approaches with the energizing impact of community-focused strategies. 

You’ll discover how overemphasis on rules can dampen enthusiasm and engagement, while leading with mission, mutual respect, and collaboration can boost volunteer retention, motivation, and teamwork. 

Nonprofit Community – Episode Highlights

  • [01:04] – Shifting Paradigms: Compliance vs. Community 
  • [03:27] – Exploring Volunteer Compliance 
  • [05:04] – Defining Community in Volunteerism 
  • [06:27] – Comparing Compliance and Community Approaches 
  • [09:08] – Impact on Volunteer Experience 
  • [14:35] – Balancing Compliance and Community 
  • [20:52] – Practical Tips for Building Your Nonprofit Community 

Nonprofit Community – Quotes from the Episode 

“What people really care about is the mission, and how the people you’re serving are impacted, or the people that benefit from your work.”  

“We want volunteering to be a place where people can feel that strong sense of community because community building is super powerful when people feel like they are in community. It builds bonds that cannot be broken.” 

About the Show

Nonprofit leadership author, trainer, consultant, and volunteer management expert Tobi Johnson shares weekly tips to help charities build, grow, and scale exceptional volunteer teams. Discover how your nonprofit can effectively coordinate volunteers who are reliable, equipped, and ready to help you bring about BIG change for the better.

If you’re ready to ditch the stress and harness the power of people to fuel your good work, you’re in exactly the right place!

Contact Us

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

Rate, Review, & Follow Us on Apple Podcasts

If you love the content Tobi shares on the Volunteer Nation podcast, consider rating and reviewing the show! This helps us reach more people – and help more good causes just like yours – successfully engage enthusiastic, dedicated volunteers with less stress and more joy.

Click here, scroll to the bottom, tap to rate with five stars. Then, select “Write a Review” and let us know what you loved most about this episode!

Also, if you haven’t done so already, follow the podcast so you don’t miss a thing. Follow now!

Subscribe to ProNews: Our Weekly Resource Roundup

If you’d like to stay up to date on all new podcasts, blogs, freebies, and deals posted on our Tobi Johnson & Associates and VolunteerPro websites, subscribe to our weekly ProNews newsletter.

Every Wednesday, we’ll send you a digest of our freshest content, plus a bonus! Once you confirm your subscription, you’ll get our [Free eBook] The New Volunteer Manager: The First 90 Days.

Episode #164 Transcript: Moving from Volunteer Compliance to Building Your Nonprofit Community

Tobi: Hey everybody, it is a beautiful spring day here in the Pacific Northwest. I’m in Washington for the summer. And I am looking outside, looking at blue sky. Very few clouds, which is Western Washington state, rains a lot here. But once summer hits, Hey, summer in. Here and spring here are beautiful. Have a lilac bush, blooming some rhododendron. It’s gorgeous. Birds are flitting about in the field and pecking at dandelion seeds. 

It’s joyous thing. Anyway. Let me talk about something. I’m going to do a little paradigm shift today. I want us to really think about this idea of volunteer compliance versus building your nonprofit community. So how can we move from one to the other? Do we need both? How do they relate to one another? How can we do better by our volunteers? 

Let’s kick it off by a little thought experiment. Were you ever in a relationship with someone who was over controlling, like a friend, a partner, a coworker, or even a supervisor where. Either due to their anxiety, maybe they’re nervous and they’re worried about you and everything you’re doing, and so they want to make sure to control you, so you don’t get hurt. 

Or maybe they’re codependent that they think you need their micromanagement. Or maybe they believe they should be in control of your life because, or part of your life anyway, because they, they have more power than you, or they believe they have more power than you. There’s lots of reasons why people owe control or try to control other people but think what it’s felt like when you’ve been on the receiving end of that. 

What did it make you feel like? How did it make you feel when someone’s trying to control you? Do you feel frustrated, angry, like you’re untrusted? Maybe even feeling a little rebellious or even a lot rebellious? I. It’s not a great thing to feel as human beings like we’re being under someone else’s control. 

So today and this week, I want to continue our discussion about building connection, which we’ve, we talked about in Volunteer Nation, episode 162, the number one secret to deep volunteer participation. Where I talked about six different ways to deepen volunteer participation through connection. I want to continue that theme a little bit, but I really want to dig into deepening a sense of community amongst volunteers and some of the things that we might be doing that are blocking a feeling of community. 

And so today I want to challenge a deep-seated paradigm in our sector that of quote unquote compliance. I want to dig into this a little bit. What do we mean by compliance? I hear people say this a lot. Volunteer compliance, employee compliance. It’s sort of an HR term. And I dug in a little, did a little research, and I found on some volunteer management software websites that a, a couple of different things. 

One title was Ensuring Compliance with Legal and Organizational Standards. So, it was a title of a blog post or are you compliant with volunteering laws? Or volunteer management. Why checkpoints and compliance matter. This term has kind of gotten under my skin a little bit. So, I went into the definitions because I went like, why is this term bothering me? 

So, the definitions that I found, some of them are the action or fact of complying with a wish or command, conformity in fulfilling official requirements, the act or process of complying to a desire, demand proposal regimen or coercion. Unworthy or excessive acquiescence. A disposition to yield to others the ability of an object to yield elastically when a force is applied. 

So, flexibility, compliance, and flexibility are seen as sort of synonymous. When you think about that, is that the kind of relationship we want with the people who are supporting our good cause coercion or acquiescence or yielding elastically. When we apply force, I just start thinking of this and I’m like, this is something to dig into. 

So, let’s look at the other side. Alternately, what do we mean by community? So, a community can be a unified body of individuals. I looked at a bunch of definitions, a group of people with a common characteristic or interest living together within a larger society. So sometimes community is about place, but it doesn’t have to be place-based, right? 

A feeling of fellowship with others because of sharing common attitudes, interests, and goals. I feel like that’s more. What we aspire to when it comes to volunteers and working together collectively to move a mission forward and the feeling of fellowship with others because of sharing common attitudes, interests and goals. 

Joint ownership or participation is another definition. If you’re wondering the differences between volunteer centric, community centric, organization centric, I dig a lot deeper into this in episode 1 27, so check that out. I talk about the differences between those, so I wanted to point that out as well. 

As we, we move on into our discussion of community versus compliance clients, interesting stuff. Are we building a nonprofit community or are we trying to find people who are compliant? So, let’s go into this in a little bit deeper. I want to sort of put these things side by side and see what they, how they feel differently, right? 

Let’s look at the differences contrast between enforcing compliance and building your nonprofit community when it comes to purpose. So, enforcing compliance. The goal is really to ensure volunteers follow your rules, right? Your policies, procedures, expectations. Often, it’s for safety and liability or consistency. 

It’s also about risk management and organizational accountability, and I am not against risk management. In fact, next week I’ll be traveling to facilitate a risk assessment and prioritization process as well as an appreciative inquiry with one of our clients. I’m just trying to figure out in today’s world where the need for building community is so big. 

Are there things we’re doing or the way we’re going about things working against us? So, I’m, I’m really exploring this in this episode. Let’s not try to think of it as super black and white. I’m just trying to explore what this really means. So, in terms of purpose around building your nonprofit community alternately or kind of. 

Contrasting against enforcing compliance. The goal is to foster connection, trust, and shared purpose among volunteers. It emphasizes belonging, motivation, and long-term engagement. So that’s one way to compare around purpose. Let’s compare these two sorts of approaches or actions around volunteer engagement, around approach and tone. 

So, for enforcing compliance. This is often top down in rule focus, so it’s very command and control. It may involve checklist, documentation, consequences, formal training. The tone can feel rigid or authoritative if it’s not handled sensitively. And I know of some organizations that I’ve done comms audits with, or I’ve explored or program audits, and I’ve seen a very extensive application and onboarding process. 

Presumably because of risk, but that feels that it feels very onerous right to go through this entire process. Now, in contrast, building your nonprofit community, that type of activity in the approach and tone is collaborative and relationship centered. It includes inclusive communication. Peer support, recognition, and opportunities for feedback. 

The tone is warm, encouraging, and people centered. So, building a nonprofit when it’s approach and tone, you can feel the difference between both. Let’s look at the impact on the volunteer experience. With a compliance focus, volunteers may feel like cogs in a machine. We often talk about vol, or I hear people talk about, it’s not my favorite term, but volunteer slots, filling volunteer slots. 

So, volunteers may feel like cogs in a machine. Certainly, if you’re referring to them as people that, or. That we’re going to fill slots with. I can see how that might feel that way, especially if enforcement is emphasized without relationship building. Some may disengage if the environment feels overly controlling. 

So, think about this. So, with a compliance focus, think about. How many people or how many organizations, one of the first things that their potential volunteer applicant is asked before they’ve even talked to anybody. You’re on a website and someone asks you to sign a waiver and submit to a background check, et cetera, et cetera. 

Now, sometimes that’s before they ever have spoken with anybody. That’s the first thing they’re doing on a website if they’re interested, and so you think about that. When it comes to relationship building and it can feel more controlling because there’s no other options, right? There’s no conversation. 

Now, it doesn’t mean that we don’t need to do background checks, depending on the role, et cetera, but I. You can see why people might disengage, right? So, in contrast, a community focus around the volunteer experience is that volunteers are more likely to feel seen, heard, and valued. A strong sense of community fosters trust, retention, intrinsic motivation, and meet expectations so people feel connected to people. 

And therefore, they feel like they want to continue to step up, right? Versus a cog in a machine. You see the difference in when there’s a compliance, an emphasis on compliance versus an emphasis on building your nonprofit community? I. See the difference. All right, let’s keep going. I’ve got a few other ones. 

Outcomes. Let’s look at outcomes of our efforts. So, when we’re enforcing compliance, what happens is it leads to consistency, risk reduction, and clear accountability, and it’s essential for legal and safety concerns. But it can stifle initiative if over-emphasized. So, if we are overly controlling folk or overly focused on compliance, then people stop innovating. 

They stop taking initiative. They just stand and wait for orders to be given right now. In contrast, when you’re building your nonprofit community. This might lead to loyalty, teamwork, and mission alignment. Volunteers are more likely to self-regulate and hold each other accountable when they feel connected. 

When we feel as if we are friends with the folks we are, especially in a volunteer environment now work. Folks, people who are employees don’t necessarily have to be friends, but volunteers remember our, our social folks and they are volunteering in their leisure time. Unless they’re getting paid, they are not considering their volunteering as employment. 

It’s a different approach, but once you start paying a volunteer, their sort of perspective changes. So, it’s always interesting when there’s unpaid volunteers that are also paid for some parts of work at the organization. Very hard for them to switch gears in terms of their relationship with the organization. 

And at some point, often they want to get paid for all their work. So, I just ask you in terms of com volunteer compliance versus building your nonprofit community or community around your nonprofit, which feels better to you. When I compared those. If you had a choice, take the perspective of a potential volunteer. 

If you had a choice of two organizations side by side, one was more compliance focused and one was more community focused, given that you’re a volunteer in the community, take off your employee hat for a minute, which would you choose? Which would you choose? So, I think it’s important to think about this because we are in an environment right now where we are in some ways having a difficult time. 

Well, first, it’s an uncertain time. We’re having big programs get cut. Organizations are struggling with. Funding some organizations, and we need our supporters more than ever, both to step up as volunteers, to step up as funders, to step up as advocates, et cetera. And so, imagine asking someone to advocate for you, and you have a, you are on the spectrum of compliance versus community. 

You’re leaning like 95% into compliance. What does, what kind of invitation? Does that feel like to people in the community? Do people want to be controlled like that to that level? It’s something to think about now. In practice as leaders of volunteers and ethical organizations, it’s a balanced approach. 

Successful volunteer organizations do both. They set and uphold clear standards, which is our compliance side, while we cultivate a culture of care and connection, which is the community side, right? The people versus paperwork. But I would argue, and this is where I’m kind of paradigm questioning the paradigm that. 

At some point, someone in our field said, you know what? We need to manage volunteers. Like we manage employee human resources. Now, there’s no given around that. In fact, there’s lots of organizations that have volunteers that don’t, uh, work in that way. Think about political campaigns. Think about grassroots organizing, think about volunteer driven and programs, and. 

Organizations that are a hundred percent volunteer, none of them use a HR approach. So, I would argue that perhaps the pendulum has swung way too much towards compliance, and that building community around your nonprofit is much more important than compliance. If you hope to invite the public to support, you at this moment in time. 

At this moment in time, I think we’re in a context right now that’s unique. People are questioning authority of institutions. Now you can say, well, that doesn’t really have anything to do with us, but you’re in in a context that. Volunteers come from society, they come from a world, they don’t come from a hermetically sealed environment. 

And even when they join our organizations, they are not in a heme, hermetically sealed environment. Everything impacts everything. Right. So, I want us to just, I, I’m calling this out for us to think about it. Like, does being Uber compliant having an a on the compliance scale if compliance is on one side and, and building communities on the other? 

Does being hyper compliant, asking for hyper compliance, and I know for some of you there are federal rules and there are rules that you don’t have control over, but is it shooting in the foot? And if so, even in an environment where somebody else writes the rules, isn’t it time to start advocating, hey, you know what? 

These rules aren’t working for today’s volunteers now. I’ve also got some solutions for you. I would never raise something like this, and I never do raise something that’s an offer, an alternate critique, and not offer some solutions. Okay, so let’s pause for a quick break from my discussion about moving from volunteer compliance to building your nonprofit community and when we return. 

I’m going to share some tips on how to deepen community around your nonprofit and maybe not emphasize so much of the compliance side, or at least how to work with it to soften it. I’m not asking for revolution here. What I’m asking for is for us to think clearly about what’s absolutely needed, but also to think about how we’re communicating. 

Our compliance activities or requirements and so don’t go anywhere. I’m going to have really good tips for you right after the break. We’ll be right back.  

VOLUNTEER PRO IMPACT LAB 

Hey, are you looking to upgrade and modernize your volunteer program? Or maybe you’re building one from scratch and you’re just not sure where to start. If so, we’ve got the perfect resource for you. The Volunteer Pro Impact Lab, having built several direct service programs from the ground up. I know that it doesn’t happen by accident. It’s a clear process that takes careful attention with a focus on impact. In the end, you need a system in place that’s clear, standardized, efficient, and that gets results. 

In addition, and maybe this is the most important, you need a volunteer program design that directly contributes to your organization’s most critical goals. That’s where the Volunteer Pro Impact Lab comes in. When it comes to effective volunteer engagement, our bespoke volunteer strategy success path model, which is the heart of our resources and strategic advising, will help you transform your volunteer strategy from fundamental to a fully mature what’s working now approach and all in less time. 

With our online assessment, you’ll quickly gain clarity on precisely where to focus your efforts, and we’ll provide recommendations for the exact steps needed. For sustainable growth, regardless of how large or small your organization is or what your cause impact area or focus is. Our program development and implementation support model will help you build a strong foundation so volunteerism can thrive at your good cause. 

If you are interested in learning more, go to volpro.net/join and we’ll share how to get started and what’s involved.  

Okay, we’re back with more tips. My discussion about how to move from a volunteer compliance to building your nonprofit community, they may feel, and I’ve certainly been presenting them as alternate options, but I also did make the point that there is a balance that. 

Organizations that are trying to engage in best practices, organizations that are trying to work ethically. Certainly, it’s not a free for all, and we do want to protect our volunteers and our clients and the people that we serve, our organization’s reputation, all of those things. But I want to offer some ways to balance this out a little bit better. 

And as promised, I’m going to give you some real practical tips here. So, first tip about how we might go ahead balancing this out a little bit better, leverage social proof. So, if you’ve listened to my podcast at some point, you probably heard me talk about social proof. If you don’t know what this is, it’s basically human beings decide what’s right and the actions to take based on what they see other people doing. 

So, this is why things like ratings and reviews mean so much to us as human beings. We will read reviews; we will look at star ratings. We will decide whether we’re going to act based on strangers, the opinions of complete strangers, right? That’s social proof. And the more uncertain people feel, the more they rely on social proof. 

And social proof isn’t necessarily; the crowd isn’t necessarily right. We just think they’re right. So, what can you do give social proof to, to balance between compliance and community? Share inspired stories and photos from the field volunteers working in your, in your organization, and highlight some of the milestones, some of the things they’ve achieved while working within your team’s guidelines. 

You want, you’re showing people and you’re, you’re featuring people who are. Actually, working with your system, within your system and are achieving things for your mission and for themselves, right? And for the people they serve. So that’s a way of leveraging social proof. You’re saying people like us do things like this. 

This is what we’re up to. The next thing is you can, when you’re recruiting, you can invite. People to become part of your nonprofit community of change makers and our community of change makers, again, goes about things in this way because we believe this together. So, we do these things together, so we make sure that we track everything we’re doing so we can celebrate together how fantastic our work is, et cetera. 

Right. Okay. Another tip for balancing this between volunteer compliance and, and community building or the paperwork of the people lean into your mission even more. This is an area of communications that I think our nonprofits really have not figured out yet. I. I think we’ve got a way to go, most of us in learning to lead with the mission. 

I’m seeing advocacy out there around funding cuts, et cetera, and the funding cuts are often focused on people losing their jobs, which of course, that’s horrible service members losing their jobs, et cetera, or the organization losing funding. But ultimately, what people really care about is the mission and how the people you’re serving are impacted or the people that benefit from your work. 

You may not be a direct service organization, may be an arts and culture organization, but people benefit from, for example, your garden. Or your historic home and garden or your festival or whatever type of nonprofit or your professional association, people benefit from that. And so, what happens when there’s not enough resources? 

How does that impact the end user? We spend a lot of time talking about ourselves, our organization, how it works, who works there, both paid and unpaid, but. When we’re leaning into our mission, we focus on the end result in our communication. So, in this case, if we want to balance between compliance and community, we want to double down on the connections between your mission. 

So, let’s say it’s helping children and why certain items are needed from volunteers, like background checks. So, you might frame your policies for. Caring for each other and those you serve. Like we do this because we value you and we value the, the safety of the children that we’re taking responsibility for helping. 

  1. Right, and I’ve seen this play out in my own. I instituted BA background checks in one of my last roles as a program director. A lot of team members told me that all the volunteers are going to quit. Because we had long-term vol, like 20 years volunteers have been around. I said, no, they’re not. I’m going to talk to them about why it’s important because our, the people we serve are sharing vital personal information that someone.

Who wasn’t completely honest or wanted to steal identities could, so we’ve got to do this. And when I explained it, we didn’t lose a single volunteer because we talked about the mission. So that when people hear the mission and understand the result, that’s when they’re able to understand and feel more that there’s a community, there’s a reason behind all these rules. 

Okay, another tip. Change how you communicate now. Everything I’ve said so far is about communication, but I really want to talk about communication directly to your volunteers. So balancing reminders. Sometimes we feel like we’re nagging when we’re asking things for things repeatedly. Nevertheless, balance them with appreciation and updates that connect volunteers to the impact of their work. So even if it’s a reminder email about, hey, get your hours in, can you still include some aspect of gratitude now? If you’re grumpy and not able to report what you need to report to whoever, this may seem really like counterintuitive. You’re like, are you kidding me? 

These people are not getting what they signed on to do. Right. And we feel very, you know, but people have other things going on in their lives and they’re volunteers, so let’s just give him some grace. If you’re communicating around things, requirements, I don’t even like to call them requirements, although they are requirements. 

So, use we language instead of you must. So, like instead of you must sign in and out, or you will lose hours, why not? We all sign in and out so that we can celebrate the amount of impact we make together? Celebrate and make it normal. Really look at. Each word, are you using compliance related words or can you communicate the same request or expectation with a community-based word? 

Think about it, words matter, and words will fire up a schema in our brain. So, when we hear a word that resonates with us, it fires up a network of neurons in our brains that are associated concepts and words. So, if people hear community-based words, their brain lights up and starts thinking about all aspects subconsciously about community. 

So, it creates, their whole brain is thinking community. If it’s compliance related, like thou shalt, you must then it’s all about compliance. So, you’re firing up more than just that one thought. Okay. Another tip. I have two more tips for you. One is. Around training this other. This next tip is around training. 

Engage in two-way learning. Now, learning and training is often presented as a compliance activity. You must take this training, or you cannot be certified to volunteer, or you must come to the orientation, or we will not. Sign you up for a, a shift, those kinds of things. So, let’s talk about, or let’s think about how we can engage differently in how we talk about learning and how we create learning. 

So, can we make learning and training interactive and peer driven? Can we invite feedback from our volunteers about what they might want to learn? And that might be in the training itself. Can we talk about. How we become stronger together. By coming together in our community training, our community orientation training. 

So, there’s, there’s ways to think about that. Can we design our training so that people have some say or have some interaction? Okay. The other thing, during supervision and learning, when we’re coaching people. We wanna check in with volunteers on how things are going with them and own what we might need to adjust as a leader. 

So that’s co-producing learning when we’re coaching others. So, when we’re addressing an issue, we might ask, what support would help you tackle this better? Rather than just pointing people out, out what’s wrong and what they should do instead. So if we engage in two-way, this two-way conversation, it feels, even though we’re trying to get people to quote unquote compliance around a certain way of doing things or certain policy, et cetera, that can be done in a community-based way, depending on how you approach it. 

I am going to do upcoming in a couple of episodes, I’m going to do an upcoming episode on training, so stay tuned for that. I’m going to talk about a very simple way, for my four-step way of approaching training, so stay tuned and it will be this sort of interactive, how can we get some interaction on our trainings? 

Okay. Final tip. Co-produce results whenever possible. This is inviting input on program improvements, event planning, problem solving, whatever decisions are being made, whether you’re doing a fast poll or doing a listening session, or you’re inviting volunteers to an advisory group, or you have a project team. 

This is a collective activity for the most part. Now we have some solo volunteers doing solo projects or working solo. Remotely. But ultimately, most people want to volunteer because they want to be part of a community of people that care about what they care about. So, we want to include volunteers in feedback loops or advisory groups, even small choices like voting on the next training topic or a T-shirt color or having a contest around a logo designer or t-shirt design. 

All those can build community. And it helps sort of, if you have compliance activities that it’s hard to present in a different way. You’re at least creating other things that defray kind of the feeling you’re giving control back to volunteers. Let’s say you have background checks, so you have a, if you do background checks, then you have control over that. 

That’s a compliance activity. But you know. You’re also, if you’re co-producing results with volunteers, you’re also offering them that volunteers to have a way to, to have control as well. It’s about power. Y’all, again, today, society’s evolving and the command and control. Supervisory style that died off a long time ago, right? 

Younger people really want to have a say. They really want to be collaborative. And if your organization is struggling to either attract or maintain volunteer engagement, think about your compliance versus. Building community. Is it compliance or community building? And how can even your compliance activities include some aspect of community building? 

And it takes creativity. I’m not saying it doesn’t, but I gave you some tips today, some ideas and just. I’m not sure. I think we still need to question whether a hundred percent the HR model is the best model? Is it still working? Now, again, I work with consultant clients and we’re using HR models. 

We’re looking at how this works, but I’m con consistently thinking, how are we really. Offering the community because they’re going to decide whether to support our nonprofit often based on the culture that they perceive. Does this feel like a place where I’m going to be treated like I’m welcomed, where I’m going to have a little bit of a say, or at least I’m going to feel like I am in community with other people, that it’s not a cold and unfeeling environment, that people don’t treat me like a widget. 

Right. There’s a lot of places for people to volunteer in the world. It’s quite competitive and one of the things you’re competing against is people just doing other stuff in their social life or with their families. And if volunteering feels like too much, they will stop. They won’t engage. Because life is stressful right now. 

Why add more stress to my life if I’m already stressed out? Right. We want volunteering to feel easy or not harder. And we want volunteering to be a place where people can feel that strong sense of community because community building is super powerful when people feel like they are in community, it builds bonds that cannot be broken. 

It’s very hard to break those bonds once people feel like they are in it to win it with others. I mean, I know this, I’ve been volunteering with almost the same team for almost a decade. The same people and we love each other. We love what we do together. We don’t hang out as friends, otherwise we just volunteer and then we get together once in a blue moon, but we would never not show up for one another. 

And so that’s the deep connection. We want to help build in our volunteers and when we build that they will be loyal and supportive of our organizations no matter what happens. But if our organizations are focused on compliance and paperwork, most of the time just doesn’t feel that good to people. And so that’s why I wanted to call this out today. 

I hope it’s challenged you just to think. And again, I. You don’t make all the rules all the time, but can you start advocating and can you bring data to the table that says, hey, this, we’ve always done it this way. Stuff isn’t working anymore. All right, so I hope this has inspired you, challenged you, and maybe even validated you on some things you’ve been thinking or trying. 

All right, so take care. I hope that that this has been helpful. I hope you’ll share it with anybody else who might benefit, maybe somebody who you need to advocate for change with, and I hope you’ll join us next week. So, we’ll be back next week with another episode of the Volunteer Nation Podcast. So, take care everybody. This has been a fun one.