167 – Keeping Civic Engagement Alive Despite Funding Cuts with Sam Fankuchen

June 19, 2025

Episode #167: Keeping Civic Engagement Alive Despite Funding Cuts with Sam Fankuchen 

In this episode of Volunteer Nation, Tobi Johnson is joined by Sam Fankuchen, founder and CEO of Golden, about how nonprofit organizations can stay resilient and keep civic engagement alive amid uncertainty, disasters, and radical funding cuts.  

They discuss current stresses in the nonprofit sector, particularly around funding uncertainties, and share practical tips for organizations to pivot and adapt their missions to serve community needs effectively. Sam introduces Golden’s $500 million in-kind donation of software to support volunteer management and highlights the importance of using technology to streamline operations, engage volunteers, and meet today’s evolving demands.  

Civic Engagement – Episode Highlights

• [06:18] – Sam’s powerful 9/11 story and what catalyzed his civic journey 
• [13:00] – Early barriers to volunteering as a teen 
• [16:55] – Discovery of social entrepreneurship at Stanford 
• [20:28] – What volunteering really is, beyond traditional definitions 
• [24:22] – Global volunteerism, SDGs, and why civic action still matters 
• [33:45] – Strategy pivot: How to pursue your mission in uncertain times 
• [43:15] – Golden’s $500M in-kind software donation 
• [47:10] – A 3-step framework for mission pivots 
• [51:38] – The ripple effect of funding changes on the entire ecosystem 
• [56:20] – How to better align your volunteer model with community need 
• [1:03:25] – What makes a great volunteer experience (and what Gen Z expects) 
• [1:09:15] – Three tips for tech-resistant organizations 

Helpful Links

• Volunteer Management Progress Report 
• VolunteerPro Blog Post: Teen Volunteering: How to Actually Engage Young People 
• Volunteer Nation Episode #165: New Research from Points of Light with Jennifer Sirangelo  
• Volunteer Nation Episode #116: New Ways of Thinking About Volunteer Data & Tech with Chris Martin 
• Chronicle of Philanthropy’s Nonprofit Layoff Tracker 
• Charity Navigator List of Charities Impacted by USAID Cuts  
• United Nation Sustainable Development Goals 
• Golden 
• Find Sam on LinkedIn  

Contact Us

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

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Episode #167 Transcript: Keeping Civic Engagement Alive Despite Funding Cuts with Sam Fankuchen 

Tobi: Well, welcome everybody to another episode of the Volunteer Nation podcast. I have got a treat because I know that there’s been quite a bit of stress lately in our sector and in the nonprofit sector. There’s massive uncertainty around funding. There have been radical funding cuts already. People have lost jobs, especially our national service, some of our national service folks, because their funding went away. 

We are really in an interesting time, a difficult time, and some of our folks in our communities, our companies in our communities are stepping up to help. You know, our missions go on no matter what. So, whether we have funding from certain sources or not, it, it’s always a time to pivot. 

The sector Challenge is not new to our sector at all, but we are so resilient in terms of finding ways to make it work, and that’s what today is all about. So today we’re going to talk about keeping civic engagement alive despite funding cuts with Sam Fankuchen. And I want to introduce Sam before we get started and then we’ll kick it off and start having some conversation. 

Sam Fankuchen is founder and CEO of Golden. He has unparalleled visibility into program strategies and operations of 40,000 organizations and nonprofit government, CSR, education, healthcare, and Disaster Relief. As the engaged participants in volunteering and donation activities, golden has won awards from the Gates Foundation, the Webby Awards, meta-Time IDO, and other luminaries and collaborates with University College, London, Microsoft, Stanford, HAI, around artificial intelligence for advancing human quality of life. Sam has spoken on social entrepreneurship, cross sector collaboration, disaster response, and digital ethics at Stanford, Harvard, UPenn, USC America Service Commissions, and has testified before the Congressional Commission on National Military and Public Service. 

Sam also holds board and advisory positions with the engaged Journal, Webby and Anthem Awards, gates Greater Giving Summit, giving Tuesday, and the Giving Platform Collaborative. So, he’s got quite the network. So welcome to the Volunteer Nation Podcast, Sam.  

Sam: Oh, thank you for that lovely introduction, Tobi, and it’s a sincere pleasure and honor to be with you and this listenership today. As somebody who has been deeply interested in this space for a long time. I would say since 2001 and most actively since about 2006. I look for inspiration anywhere I can find it, and I think for many of us who are in the day-to-day of thinking about what comes next and how to do what we do better, you are often a voice that many of us listen to, myself included, and this being the first, first chance we’ve ever had to, to have a direct conversation. 

I’m quite excited for it and quite excited to naturally let this conversation evolve in whatever direction is most helpful for those who follow you.  

Tobi: Awesome. Well thank you so much for your kind words. You know, we just put stuff out and hope that it lands, you know, sometimes I think maybe, I don’t know, it’s always great to get feedback. 

Because you know, when you’re podcasting, you’re just sort of sitting, you’re not hearing from your audience. Except when I go out and speak and then people come up and and talk to us about it. But let’s kick off. I love to talk about people’s birth stories with nonprofits and technology or whatever civic engagement or whatever space subspace they’re working. 

I feel like we work in niches of niches. So, tell us how you got into nonprofit, into volunteerism, civic engagement, technology. Just tell us about your journey and how you got here.  

Sam: Happy to do that and certainly could spend a long time on this. And, and there’s some other places online folks can go if they do for some reason want to go deeper into the origin story. But for context setting, I think some of it would be very helpful to share. So, I grew up largely in Southern California, although my family has always been really distributed and part of the legacy in my family was to go to high school in the northeast, or at least that’s what my parents thought. So, I reluctantly agreed to do that my sophomore year of high school to transfer. 

And I went out to Boston with my two parents and three siblings, and they went to go move me into school. And the, the first evening that I got there, we were all going to go out to dinner or to target something like that. And I just didn’t really feel it at the time. I thought, hey, why don’t I just get settled in and maybe we can do this tomorrow instead. 

So, I went to bed the next morning, I walked up to the front door of the classroom building for the first time. To find that the doors were bolted shut, like chain shut and overhead. There were a bunch of low flying F sixteens in formation going very slowly, which I thought was a bit ominous and strange. 

And we were redirected to the school auditorium where we started to learn as everybody else did that day, about September 11th and all the events happening around September 11th. But the thing for me was my entire immediate family that went to go drop me off at this school, because I decided to go, was all scheduled on American Airlines Flight 11 back to LA from Boston. 

And it wasn’t until three days later when the cell phones came back up and all of us started to learn more about the story. I discovered that my family went standby the night before and didn’t tell me all five of them somehow got on a standby flight. And that experience as September 11th was for all of us who saw it, let alone had some proximity to it, was extremely disorienting for me. 

Not in a way I realized at first in a way that I’ve become familiar with in subsequent events of my life, strangely, but in a way that I realize now. And I realized months later was very disorienting. And what I was left with was a hypersensitivity to how people around me, sorry, there’s an Amber alert going on my phone. 

How? How This is the world we live in. And in fact, that’ll be the theme for today, I’m sure. So, the idea that each of us can live in a coddled state where everything is a constant. I think we’ve all given up on that after COVID. Yep. And we’ve seen so many other things happen since then. But this was my first exposure to a disaster setting and being that close to it. I’d been in hurricanes, I’ve been in earthquakes, I’ve been in fires, but not disasters.  

Tobi: Mm-hmm.  

Sam: And what I saw was a bunch of people around me going through the motions in life and doing things because people told them to do it or because they wanted to go to a good college or something. And I didn’t see people engaged in things that were really meaningful to them. 

And I just thought, whatever it is out there that’s going to be meaningful for me, I want to find it. And I tried to find it through service. And as a, you know, at the time of September 11th, I was 15, just about to turn 16. I. So, by the time I got serious about trying to find volunteer opportunities, I was 16 or 17. 

And for those of us who work in this space, understanding what that looks like, you know, one from the organizer’s perspective, maybe 16- and 17-year-olds, the assumption is they’re not skilled or they need maybe parental consent or they’re going to require training. The perspective from somebody at that age is, I have a lot of energy, and I would really like to apply it. 

I’d really like to know how it can be helpful and. At that time, it’s still the case today, but it was much more the case at that time. Trying to figure out where to get started in volunteering wasn’t obvious. I tried to go through the school, through friends, through religious groups, through websites that existed at the time, through everything else, and I just found the journey to be really complicated, never exactly the way I expected it to be, and holistically ignorant of who I was. 

You know what? Whether that was interests or qualifications or anything else, it was just a bit of a black box and. So, I thought, you know, after going through all those, those processes and doing a lot of volunteering, I thought, how is it that anybody else who’s any less motivated than I was would ever go through this? 

It just doesn’t seem rational for effort it requires versus what I would do and what my life cycle of engagement would look like. And so, I ended up getting very interested in that problem. And I had enrolled as an undergraduate in Stanford as a public policy major. And while I was there, I discovered the field of social entrepreneurship. 

And I just became deeply interested in doing it. I, I always knew I wanted to be an entrepreneur, and had I known the field of social entrepreneurship existed, I would’ve known immediately that I wanted to be a social entrepreneur. And so, I, you know, started getting a business plan together. I pitched it in a class my sophomore year for something quite like what Golden is today. 

And then 36 hours later had funding offers from two very large Silicon Valley companies, not even venture capital firms to fund it. And that started my journey into social entrepreneurship. And from there, I picked up the technology as I went in those days, I had to learn some basic code on my own. And then technologies have become easier in some ways since then. 

Ethically, they’ve become more complicated with, in particular the advent of ai. But even prior to that, concerns about personal information, privacy, security, et cetera. So in the time since then, I think with the North Star around, how do you make the experience of volunteering easier, more natural, more engaging, more personalized, and also as somebody who’s on a mission, organizing a program, whether that be a direct volunteer service program in a nonprofit or maybe an indirect one on behalf of a faith group, a government, a school, a company, or any other kind of entity. 

Uh, how do you deliver your mission by engaging people properly? And we’ve used technology along the way to get us closer to that idea. And technology has made things possible that we’re not possible before, but the idea is still the most significant part of, of solving the problem.  

Tobi: Yeah, absolutely. And it’s interesting. I wish they would’ve had social entrepreneurship when I was in college. When I went to grad school, my intent was the same, that to do good to work in the nonprofit sector. It was my intention right off the bat to go straight into nonprofits and ended up working in the sector for 25 years before I started Volunteer Pro and my consulting practice. 

So, I totally get that mission. You’re just aligned. It just is what you do. It is who you are. Given this background, let’s fast forward to today. Why do you think volunteerism and civic engagement are important in today’s world? I love to ask our guests this question because people have different reasons around their big why and why these things are important today. 

Sam: Individually. I think each of us deserves to lead a high quality of life. However, we define that a life filled with happiness, a life filled with productivity or meaning, or a life where when we begin it versus when we end it, we see advancement in our surroundings somehow. I think that should be the focus of what it means to be human and, and it’s different for everybody. 

It would be great at the society level, societal level. If we could do that together. If we could say in addition to each of these journeys that we’re all on, what if we could make the experience of being a human being better for other human beings who come after us? I don’t mean it to sound profound. If you’re a parent, maybe you know that feeling, or if you’re somebody who’s just thought philosophically about life a little bit, maybe that’s something that’s resonated. 

And what’s interesting to me about volunteering is everybody can be a volunteer and what we consider volunteering to be in the classical sense, the traditional sense versus functionally what it is, which is just being of service to other people or prioritizing other people’s needs. I think it’s a much bigger opportunity than most people have looked at in the past. 

I don’t look at what volunteering is based on just standardized metrics that the government has collected based on what nonprofits have reported in their nine nineties about the value of volunteer time that they’ve received. I look at it as. Does the human race use the resources we have available to us at the right times? 

And that could be basic acts of kindness and helping neighbors or just taking pain away from somebody’s everyday life. Or that could be very forward looking and thinking about human beings living on many planets. Or that could be somewhere in the middle like the UN SDGs, or what happens in 2030 when the window to pursue the SDGs is closed, and what do we do after that? 

What I would like to see is the resources that are truly available in the world be activated to be given clear pathways to be applied in effective ways, and to use our understanding of how effectively we’ve used those resources to set clear goals and achieve those clear goals. And that means volunteering, donating, activating social networks, and many other forms of service. 

But it begins with basic, everyday volunteering, just making a choice to. Follow somebody else’s lead in pursuing activities so that you understand the world around you better. And then you can get more specific, more involved, more energetic about whatever comes after that first point of engagement. And so that your subsequent points of engagement, whether those are donations or starting a program on your own or anything else are done in an informed way and not just in an emotional way. 

Tobi: Yeah. Yeah. I will. For folks who are listening, they’re wondering what the UN SDGs are, they are, the sustainable development goals and voluntary organizations around the world are leaning into these goals and choosing which ones they’re going to go after. I’ll put a link to that and if you want to learn more about that, you know, backing up on the teen volunteering and, and Sam, when you started as a teen volunteer and you were talking about. 

Basically, nonprofits don’t really get where, where teen teenagers, or young adults are coming from. Having run a few and started up a few teen programs I and young adult programs, I, I know that youth. Adult partnership is something that a lot of organizations could use that kind of philosophy. But I will also post a link to an interview I did conduct with my niece and her cousin when they were in junior high about their volunteering and what they thought people should know. 

And one of the things they thought people should know was, hey, we’ve been volunteering since we were in brownies, so to say we don’t have volunteer experience is ridiculous. You know, they were like, we’ve been volunteering for 10 years, you know, before we start doing high school volunteering. So I’ll link to that, uh, blog post. 

They are both now graduating college this week, or one graduated last week and one’s graduating this week. So, I just wanted to resonate with that for a minute. But yeah, I mean, I think as we look at, there are, even though there are constrictions or a sense of constriction or at least change in the resources available for volunteerism. 

There’s an entire world, you know, a global movement of volunteerism with UN volunteers and all, all the organizations, and many of you listen to this podcast that are in different countries, and so it’s easy to think, you know, many of you are from the US to think that this constriction. Is, um, ha this funding, this feeling of funding constriction and this feeling of being under attack really is something that’s being felt all over the world. 

However, there are also all kind, you know, we’re in the volatile world where things are changing so quickly and there is so such a glut of information out there that people are having to kind of parse through, you know, the noise to figure out, you know, the, the ways we used to reach out and find volunteers, you know, people used to volunteer for an organization or an organization’s brand for their lifetime. 

Even their whole family would support that brand. Now it’s sort of like I’m into volunteering for my experience because I believe in the cause and I’ll go to different organizations based on what, how I feel that they are addressing a specific cause and if they’re doing it effectively. I think in some ways volunteers are more certainly choosier. I think consumers are choosier about their experiences because they understand, you know, there’s nothing like an existential crisis to have you really rethink how you spend your time, like a global pandemic. But also, that people are just more informed. You know, we have people coming up who’ve done service learning, et cetera, so people are more informed and choosier about their experiences.  

So, are you seeing Sam, a need for organizations to sort of level up and use the right software to reach? And part of leveling up is, you know, using the right tools to reach people in different ways. Is there, do you think with all of this chaos, is there also a need to shift how we strategize reaching people? 

Sam: There’s so much in this question, so let me reflect back to you what I heard and then why don’t you pick what the most interesting direction to go could be. And we can go through many of these things if you want. One. First, congratulations to you and your children, uh, on their graduation. That’s, I think, hugely important and deserve celebration, especially because they’ve been volunteering for a while.  

Tobi: Yeah, yeah. They’re going to be amazing women in the world and they’re not my kids, but they’re, uh, adjacent kids in our lives and they are going to do amazing work because, partly because they already have a social conscience, obviously. 

And part of it, it’s interesting, it was part of their brownie services, part of scouts and brownies and all that, you know, there’s service learning, but they also talk in that about how organizations don’t really understand them. But be that as it may, I’ll post the link to that in the chat, but let’s get back to Sam, your comments. 

Sam: So, um, I’ll lay out a few things that you brought up, and then again, please feel free to steer us in whatever direction you want. One, how has the world changed related to funding strategies and what that means for people who operate programs, like all of us do Two generationally. How have preferences shifted? 

What supporters of organizations look for in the organizations they support. And then how do you recruit the right mix of supporters to sustain your efforts? Three, what does it mean to have a mission and to pursue a mission in a changing environment such as one with more disasters in it, or one with changing sources of funding that are significant? 

What does it mean to use software? When do you use software? When is it something that is truly a benefit versus an obligation? And how do you use it effectively? Those are all things I heard come up. Yeah. There may be more, but where would you like to start?  

Tobi: I think we should start, we’re going to talk about Golden recently announced a $500 million in-kind donation in software. I want to get to that for sure, but I love this idea. You know, there’s a lot of these we talk about on the podcast, but I love this idea of pursuing a mission in a changing environment. I think that’s something that. It doesn’t get talked about enough in our sector, so I think we should go down that rabbit hole if you’d be up for it. 

Sam: Yeah, let’s do that. Let’s start with that and let’s do it today. Let’s do it. In today’s world, today is May 14th, 2025.  

Tobi: Yep.  

Sam: Not in a hypothetical setting. Yep. So, the context that you suggested is changing to U-S-A-I-D funding, changing to AmeriCorps funding and the prospect of changing funding in a lot of other environments, I think very likely would be higher education, but there certainly will be. 

Let’s assume that it’s in every other setting, that there will be changes in funding. Let’s assume it’s US federal funding, but also other forms of funding. And just by way of example, in the case of U-S-A-I-D, the headlines have been the United States turns its back on funding foreign aid. That’s, if I had to summarize it and do it in a relatively unpolitical like apolitical way, that’s what I would say. 

But I would also say that the venues that are choosing to report that headline are political. And that’s why it sounds somewhat political, but it doesn’t need to be right. And that’s clear point. I think everyone will have their own political point of view. I. We as an organization at Golden are always apolitical. 

We just want to understand what’s happening and we want to be additive to the steps forward that, uh, are applicable. And in this case, after us made, uh, our changes to federal funding strategies, so did other countries, the UK, Netherlands in particular, both started to retract money from their foreign aid budgets. 

And so, let’s just, let’s get past that for a little bit. I think a lot of everyone’s response right now as an emotional aspect, but I would ask that if what you really want to pursue is not just sharing a point of view, but is advancing your work that you force yourself to see past whatever your political perspective on the matter is. 

And what comes after that is reality. Mm-hmm. And reality is that funding does shift all the time. It doesn’t matter if it’s coming from a foundation or the government. There are needs that change in the world and we should be using the resources we have to meet those needs. And that’s the spirit of volunteering to begin with, is recognizing where there are gaps in needs and filling those needs. 

So, what we do is we focus on precisely what those needs are. And I’ll give you another very specific setting. In today’s world, again, May 14th, 2025, I lived in Los Angeles. One other disaster moment I got thrust into were the recent wildfires in California and we’d been evacuated from where we lived before. 

And so, we’d seen how that felt. But when these fires started, within 20 minutes of, of the initial, you know, detection of these fires, we realized that we would have to evacuate in a matter of minutes or hours. And so, our family just decided to leave, and we then started going through the same things everyone else was going through and then started to see the world around us. 

We’re lucky today in that. We have a place to live, but we were affected by the fires. And so were all the communities that we’re involved in, in a direct way. And when you’re in a setting like that, as somebody who suddenly has needs, all you care about is having options.  

Tobi: Yep.  

Sam: You care about having resources, having actionable resources, having minimal time spent trying to research and decide. 

You’re not going to be in a mental place where you can make an objective decision. You may not be able to get a direct fit for your needs. You may not be able to restore a complete life in the sense, um, that you had considered before, but you have the blessings of having a future and you have the potential to invite new things into your life. 

Everybody’s position changes, but that’s one specific recent position that I’ve been in. And having gone through that. Recognizing what it means for others in other similar positions. And for us, this is really material. It’s not just our personal experience. So, at Golden for example, we support a lot of folks who work on the ground in local communities and globally. 

So that can mean people getting meals on tables and it can mean IRC placing refugees and it can mean the UN Volunteer Groups Alliance and how we think at the policy level about how the biggest volunteer programs in the world are organizing all the resources that they have to meet the needs that emerge in any given moment. Back to your question, the question is what we do with the changing funding or a mission? 

Tobi: How do we pursue a mission in a changing environment, whether it’s funding climate.  

Sam: That’s the thing, is you must, one, be pursuing a worthwhile mission to begin with. And many are and, but some may not be. 

And it’s okay to say, you know, we had an idea, and we thought this was important when we did. And maybe because of the state of the world today, resources that may have been sent our way should go to different places. And that happens, and I’m not writing it off, but I think in sending an invitation to each of us to be reasonable and to be able to remove ourselves and our ego from the work we do, and not just say, Hey, we do noble work and therefore it should continue. 

But instead of saying, if we have a clear mission and the clear mission is for this outcome or this improvement in the world, are we the correct vehicle in the ways we’ve been structuring our programs to deliver that or not? I think some people may fall into that category. Most will not for the most, who do not. 

The question is not okay; how do we keep doing exactly what we were doing to meet the stated mission? The question is, is our mission as accurate as it can be in today’s world and for the world that we can project? And when we take a minute to refine that mission to what the needs are, or sorry, to map that mission to the specific needs that exist. 

The focus could then shift to addressing those specific needs. So, for example, in the AmeriCorps world, there are AmeriCorps programs that we’re rebuilding homes, um, after hurricane in North Carolina. And those projects have been stalled because. The AmeriCorps participants who were staff there were sent home and, and some of the funds that have been directed to those projects have been paused, for example. 

That’s just one discrete example. So, the need is, well, we still have unhoused people in North Carolina, or we have these projects that have been partially built, and they may stagnate or they may never be livable. Or we could finish the projects, or we could finish the projects in phases. And that is a very concrete need. 

So, then the question is, given that we have this need, and given that our mission is to make sure that people who need housing have housing, how do we communicate what this need is in ways that people can come and support us? And that may be more volunteers, more supplies, more grants from non-government parties. 

It may be corporate alignment, you know, with, with folks that, you know, whose, whose corporate missions would, would benefit from a cross-sector partnership. It could be going to a local government. It could be tapping into other forms of support, and that’s the type of logic that we should be engaged in today. 

It’s double down on your mission, where your mission is aligned to today’s world. Itemize the specific objectives you need to solve within the domain where you operate in a way that others can look at it as immediately actionable inventory and where they can pull down and, and take some of that inventory, whether that’s the opportunity to volunteer or donate or, or support from some other way. 

And so, we had made this commitment, and I’ll just touch on it so that you can take us whatever direction you want to go, Tobi. But a few weeks ago, or not even time’s, been going in a strange, strange way these days, but time war. Time war, right? So, our observation was there’s some things that have paused that don’t deserve to pause because they’re meeting critical needs where this was the infrastructure we had to meet needs, and those needs may have even increased. 

So, for example, in COVID. You know, if, if hunger and health support were needs, those needs didn’t go away during COVID, even though the programs had to either pause, adjust, or stop under the circumstances. And if anything, the needs went up. Going through that experience and realizing how the effective organizations we work with transformed, we realize that maybe some of these AmeriCorps and U-S-A-I-D and university affiliated programs may not have learned those lessons on the fly yet, and they may not be fully aware of what’s going on or what the timeline or the course of action will be to adjust. 

But what is clear to us is we’re seeing the same pause we saw in the first six months of COVID while everyone reassesses their plans. And while that happens, the be beneficiaries of these programs, the people who depend on them are not having their needs met. And we, I wish we were able to just say, you know what? 

Take $500 million off the top of our bank accounts and just put it back and replace $370 million of AmeriCorps grants that were paused, but we’re not. And so instead what we are able to do is say, we will make a commitment to donate $500 million of software licenses. It’s specific to a plan we have called the Community plan, which allows people to recruit, screen, schedule, track, report on export data, uh, related to their volunteering and donation programs for free. 

Mm-hmm. There’s no expectation that people pay for it. We’re not going to force you to change plans or upgrade to a different form of plan. We’re just saying some people don’t have the software. Some are paying for software that is not as powerful. Um, and they should be getting this, this software free. If you’re not spending the money on the software, that money can go to doing other things like fundraising. 

And if you get the time back and the time that somebody would save by using the software in place of either tracking stuff by hand or entering it into any like manual volunteer management software or just not tracking it will be between one and three days of human person time per week. That time can then be spent on more effective activities in addition to just the money, and you will have much clearer insights on what’s happening with your program so that you can meet those needs on the ground of your beneficiaries and your supporters. 

And so, when organizers like the engaged folks who are listening to this podcast are in a position where they’re still assessing, we just want to shortcut that decision making, you know, and just say, here, just start this. This will take you a few seconds. If it doesn’t work for you, don’t worry about it. 

That in the meantime, you’re getting a ton of value for free. That’ll give you more resources in a time where people are just looking for any kind of resource. And, we hope that our posture on thinking about how to meet the needs of the moment will inspire others who have other forms of resources or this form of resource. 

You know, if, if other firms are out there and want to do things like this, that would be wonderful. Yeah. But. In the time since, since then, giving Tuesday, charity Navigator, TechSoup have all joined in and are distributing these licenses for Golden to their communities. And we’ve also been in touch with many of the, of the large faith communities. 

Again, many of them are meeting the needs within and beyond structured volunteer programs because they know their communities, their congregations, their needs, and they can just meet those needs in a very basic way. And we’re also working with some of the other really large-scale volunteering infrastructure thought leader kinds of communities. 

You know, and, and Tobi, it means a lot to be on here. This is certainly part of it. What you’re doing and, and shedding light on this story, I think is hugely important in normalizing it and making it actionable but also saying you sometimes. Like it or not, I’ll be vulnerable and, and say it, you know, we are a what’s called a for-profit social enterprise, meaning in our business model we can earn revenue and, and make profit if we so choose. 

And we do that because we want to invest in having the best technology in the world, these specifically tailored to these audiences to meet their needs in the best way in the world. And we think having that option is important, not just getting databases from whoever provides databases, but decades ago it was difficult to be a for-profit firm whose job it is to serve the nonprofit and adjacent sectors. 

There is a bit of bias, like why do we need to go outside our own? And our commitment here is we’re trying to do the best of what’s available with the same needs in mind that each organization does. And we just hope that any actor from any sector that has some kind of interest in this space, understands how special this moment in time is and does what they can.  

Tobi: Yeah, I mean it’s, you know, it’s and a great example of a pivot, right? This is the pivot that your company has chosen to make, to meet this moment. You know, there’s so much in what you just said, and I want to kind of unpack it a little bit. 

I was interviewing Jennifer Angelo yesterday from Points of Light and she said, you know, volunteerism meets this moment right now. Right? And we as different folks in the community are, uh, meeting the moments in our different ways and pivoting. You know, like one of the things we did here at Volunteer Pro was, and at Tobi Johnson Associates was, hey, you know, I have lots of experience in grassroots organizing, in addition to work with traditional charities, et cetera, et cetera, during my career. 

And so, I started doing, uh, podcasts on advocacy. Because I’m like, people don’t know that they can advocate right now. They can even advocate for legislation for a little smart part. And there’s so much we have, you know. Existing cadre of people who are ready and willing to advocate on our organization’s behalf and they are our volunteers. 

So, I felt like that just had to get called out early on. But I love you, how you broke down, how to pursue a mission in this changing environment, whether it’s funding. Whether it’s climate change, which impacts our brick and mortar, it impacts our technology. I mean, it impacts us. I had a flood in my house because of climate last year because the, the temperatures in Washington state where we spend part of our time dropped way below normal levels. 

It was like down to the teens, and that doesn’t happen here. So, people weren’t prepared. And so, everybody’s pipes started bursting. We had multiple bursts in our house, and we had to have a full tear out. We were, uh, living in hotels and with friends and with family and with Airbnb’s, and, and so I know exactly that feeling of, you know, I called it at the time trauma brain because I had to keep my, my business going and I’m doing coaching calls out of the hotel lobby, and I can’t, I’m writing checks to the wrong contractors because my brain isn’t working. 

I mean, people really kind of, if you haven’t been through where you’ve lost your housing. You know, through a disaster. It’s hard to imagine where people are at, but, but it’s very hard to think clearly. And so all of those folks that help people through disasters, I had such renewed respect for the volunteers and the service members and the folks that help people where multiple, you know, in our community there were like several, and it took us a while to get the insurance adjuster and we didn’t even know what we were looking at. 

I totally get that. So, but back to this chaotic, because we’re going to have more of this chaos, right? It’s not going away.  

Sam: Yeah. Yeah. This is, this is the new normal. And it’s not like a new temporary normal, no. We just live in a world where there will be more all kinds of disasters. 

Tobi: So, this cyclical like pivoting that we’re going to have to engage in, like people, you know, people have feathered their nests and gotten comfortable and even, you know, during COVID, I remember the first. Months of COVID, I kept telling, you know, I kept like suggesting and recommending strongly, keep your volunteers engaged. 

Whatever you can do, create a community, build E, even if they’re not able to come to your brick and mortar, get pe. And the people in our impact lab, for example, that kept volunteers in the loop on things kept so socializing with volunteers, built that community. When COVID was over the day, they asked for volunteers back, everybody came back, and it was because people felt connected. 

Other organizations, you know, unwisely cut their volunteer coordinators stop, just stop communicating with their volunteers and game over. And then they’re wondering why they don’t have volunteers. But I, back to your three pivots. So, there’s are three steps in your pivot. One is I love that idea of reasonable self-reflection. 

So, looking at your mission. Is it the right vehicle? In other words, is it the right approach to meet the need? Is this relevant in today’s world? And maybe it’s not, you know? And as a fellow entrepreneur, I completely get pivoting. You know, we’re during pivoting now. And then the second is our, you know, second part to step in this. 

So, if you’re an organization that’s listening, use this as a primer. P. Sam has given us a primer for how to think structurally about what’s happening rather than, you know, I see the economy and change in the community as a current of water and when something happens somewhere, it has ripple effects. 

Like the, the cuts and funding have ripple effects to everybody in our sector, including Sam’s business, my business, volunteers, people that are served, the community, you name it. But we don’t have to be, you know, we don’t have to take this laying out. We don’t have to just let the current like flow us wherever it’s taking us, these ripple effects, we can stand firm and say, well wait a minute, how do I impact this current? 

Because we don’t have to. It’s like life isn’t just happening. To us, life can happen for us. We can see opportunity in these currents and start to like; how do I swim with the current? How, how am I going to build strength to swim against the current? So that second part of this pivot is about, you know, is our mission as accurate as possible, as refined, as nuanced as possible, as pinpointed as possible to align with the current community need. 

Like, you know, as society evolves, so does volunteerism and so do our nonprofits. So, I would also add to that step two is your volunteer model aligned with the community need that’s aligned with your organization need and often. You know, we do our Vision Week. I talk about this and our Vision Week Strategic Planning bootcamp every year, and many nonprofit, many volunteer managers have no idea what their organization’s strategic plan is, strategic objectives, and they have a hard time getting their hands on that actual document, which, you know, how can you align if you don’t know what the goals are? 

So, this alignment between community organization and volunteer engagement needs to happen, right? And whether volunteer engagement’s the right answer, I think that’s always should be on the table. And then the third thing, how do we position if we decide to move forward? We’ve gone through this litmus test, we’ve aligned, we are able, and we feel like we have a good alignment. 

Then the third step is. How do we communicate and position what we’re doing? Because that’s going to be what attracts people to swim with you in your current, right? And that attract people to come to you and work with you. When it’s really aligned, people get it. You know, people, we used to say gr it, you know, you like totally to understand like, gestalt, you, you got it. 

And then people just come. So Sam, I assume when you decided to start to move forward with this, this investment, this $500 million donation in kind donation of software that you, people started coming to you out of the woodwork, you were just talking about it, people came to you because it made sense. Is that true? 

Sam: Yeah, I we’re thrilled. And our perspective on it is we want to be good partners to anyone who comes to us. So please do reach out. If you’re interested in partnering with us, you can just go to our website or send an email to hello@goldenvolunteer.com, and we’d love to partner. If you’re somebody who could benefit from it, obviously we would love, if you go to AmeriCorps Relief or usaidrelief.org  they all point to the same place. 

You can just fill out like basically five question survey and get the resources you need. But more importantly, it’s a, it’s kind of a gesture to say there’s so many needs. Let’s get specific on what these needs are and get the right resources, whether they’re from us or anybody else who’s inspired to motivate, you know, and, and get those resources. 

And when you can specify what the needs are, like you’re saying Tobi, it becomes much easier for people in the world around you to just say, that looks like something I can do. As a volunteer or any other kind of supporter and do it, and something you referred to earlier on the podcast that’s very relevant for what this feels like for a volunteer to make that decision to support your generations. 

It’s not a scientific framework, but just for shorthand, for those of us who live in the real world, the way volunteers used to look is, I believe in this organization, may baby boomers may say like, I have an alignment with this organization, so I’ll just do whatever the volunteer job is. Or the greatest generation and, and boomers that maybe had some exposure to some theme make it their legacy to support that theme. 

Like maybe it’s cancer research because they’ve been impacted by it. But as you go, uh, lower in age cohorts mm-hmm. Those preferences change, but the decision they make doesn’t change. So, the preferences that change is for example, for millennials. The experience needs to be something that seems relevant to them, and they need to be able to see the output of that experience and measure the difference that was made. 

So, if you don’t have volunteer management software or have a system for relating what work was done with what the result of that work is, it’s going to be very hard to recruit volunteers in today’s moment who are millennials to go and do that work. If you’re including Gen Z, it’s that, but hyper-focused. 

And the way I often compare this is think that millennials operate like boomers, operate in Facebook. You know, where they can learn about the things that they believe are relevant to them. Millennials operate in Instagram where they can see a clear story that is told to them and they can, they can have a clear call to action related to that story that is thematically on topic. 

Gen Z, the TikTok generation is thinking much more in the moment. Does this resonate? Is every instant, every bite size, every interaction on point? And does it feel fulfilling, and can I binge on it? And so, if you’re missing a gap in your cohort, just looking at demographic distribution, maybe consider the ways that you ask people to be involved as a volunteer and just run that framework through. 

Like is this something that broadly can be discussed and shared among like-minded individuals for baby boomers? Is this something that has a clear journey for a participant in a way where they can connect the dots between what they do and what the result is for millennials? Is this something where the actual experience itself is producing and resonating a feeling of intimacy and clarity for the youngest possible generation. 

And then if your mission is refined to today’s needs, and if you’re specific about the needs that are being addressed and your volunteer positions provide that kind of venue for engaging, you should be able, not just to engage volunteers, but to have those volunteers make it the center of their life right now because they live in the same world that we do and they want. Their time to be spent in meaningful ways, and they want to activate people they know to have that experience too.  

Tobi: Yeah. And people are volunteering, y’all. They are. Hey, let’s take a quick break and I have got a couple more questions. I know we’re, we’re almost at the end of our time, but let’s just take a quick break from our conversation about keeping civic engagement alive despite funding cuts with Sam Fankuchen and we’ll be right back right after the break. 

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Okay, we’re back with our discussion with Sam Fankuchen about volunteer technology and keeping civic engagement alive even in uncertain times. And we’ve talked about the three-part structure for pivoting. We’ve talked about, you know, where volunteers are at right now and how to appeal to generations, which is fantastic. We’ve talked about, you know, what is the world of uncertainty that we’re certainly involved in and that it is the way it is, and volunteerism, by the way, is something that’s positioned uniquely to meet this moment. 

But one thing I want to just touch on, Sam, if you don’t mind, is there’s going to be folks who are hesitant to take you up on your offer and we will provide links in the show notes and all gangs so you can, if you want to take olden up on their offer to get in on their community plan and really start, you know, this data, also the data you’re collecting is gonna make you more appealing to funders in addition to saving time, in addition to being able to reroute other funding, you know, for other I things you need in your budget, but it also makes you more appealing when you have solid data that you can show impact. 

You can show activity, you know, there’s different levels we. We talk about it here on outcomes when we talk about outcomes, but you know, some people might be sitting here thinking, yeah, but I, you know, our organization is very tech averse. We’ve always done it this way. I’ve feathered my nest, I’m super comfort, comfortable using my spreadsheet, and I don’t really want to change. 

Or I’ve heard horror stories about people onboarding onto a new software and their volunteers re reject it, et cetera. What are three tips you could give? Just quick tips for people who are, have doubt in their mind. I mean, I always say if you don’t use technology to reach volunteers or to find volunteers, you won’t. 

You’ll find that volunteers don’t use technology, so you become a self-fulfilling prophecy if you don’t start using tech in ways to attract volunteers. Because the folks who are tech savvy are going to use the tech to find you and then when they get on board, they won’t be resistant to using tech. So, you create your environment there, but what are your three tips? 

Sam: One, I think we all in this space owe it to ourselves to get past the distinction between the way we operate in our work and technology. Technology is no longer a separate field; it’s just part of everything. Yes,  

Tobi: Yes.  

Sam: So that if you’re having difficulty getting through that test personally. The best thing you can do is kind of check yourself and have a buddy who you can say, hey, is my bias around technology interfering here? 

Because that immediately is a flag that used to be the case maybe five, 10 years ago. Yes. But for those listening and who’ve been in this space longer than this, if you still feel like technology is something that’s ancillary and not core to what you do, there’s a problem at the personal level, not the organizational level. 

And that’s the kindest way I can, I can think to say it, but the good news is technology is all cut. Yeah. Is to put a name on it. Right. That’s what’s going on. That’s what’s going on in that setting. So, I think it’s, it’s just important to separate it because we can talk about things in generalities, but that’s one layer. 

And before we can proceed to the next things, we should start with that layer. The good news is technology these days is so much easier to use. In fact, most code that’s coming out of, and this is the deep part of technology, right? Engineering writing software. Yep. Most software that’s coming out of Facebook and Microsoft right now is not written by people anymore. 

It’s written by computers where somebody just told the computer what to do with plain language and the computer went and did it. And for those who’ve used Claude or Chat, GPT or any other AI large language model, it’s probably even easier than Google to use. Yes. So, we’ve kind of come full circle. So, we’ll start with that. 

Tobi: Yeah. Yeah. And to assume, you know, I always go back to my mom, my mom’s 82, she uses Facebook daily on her phone. Gang, you know, she has dementia. Come on. Like, people are using tech. They use whatever tools. Make sense. The other thing, I would totally agree that tech has evolved so much that interfaces are so much easier. 

I mean, I remember when we started the Volunteer Pro community back in 2015, this was before their, the idea of a paid online community as a service was not real. We had brand communities back then, but we didn’t really have these things. And it’s 10 years later and the, you know, we’ve, we’ve transitioned to three different software’s during that time just because it gets better and better. 

So, yeah. So, there’s that. But keep going. What’s your second tip?  

Sam: Second tip is let’s reset what we think of when we think of technology in the volunteering sector, and I’ll take a moment to clearly reset it. Okay. Four decades. Volunteer technology used to mean a, either promoting the idea of your organization or the construct of maybe what kind of volunteer opportunities that you have that exist on marketing websites. 

I mean, we all know the familiar names, whether those are specific to this sector, like something like volunteer match or create the good through ARP or points of Light, or whether they’re not specific like events on Eventbrite or Craigslist, for example. Mm-hmm. That was one bucket of, of technology. 

Another bucket of technology was volunteer management software. Yep. Which for decades, I. Historically evolved from people who are operating programs who knew something about technology, who home grew their own solutions and then started distributing it, either selling it or giving it away to other people. 

And those tools, and I won’t name any names, are basically Excel. They may have some more facets prebuilt for you, like more fields or more types of information you can store. But basically, you have somebody in the team whose job it is to be administrator of entering things by hand. And the third part of technology was, well then how do we take what we have in our volunteer management system, just like our database or our spreadsheet, and how do we share that beyond the organization, like with our funders or with our collaborators in government? 

Something like that. And all the other sectors that collaborate with us in, in the nonprofit sector, were not using the same tools. And so that meant we would do reporting, we’d send it over to them, they would put it in some other system and then do reporting. And the whole thing was very time consuming and not necessarily accurate because every time the human being must put something into a system, they must remember things correctly. 

They must do it timely; they can’t have errors, they must do it the same way somebody else on their team entering parallel information, did it. Um, they can’t put sensitive information that puts venerable populations at risk. There are all kinds of these things and it’s just, it feels like work. And it doesn’t feel like pursuing the mission today in 2025. 

That is not what technology and volunteering looks like. And so, if that’s what your experience looks and feels like today, you need a hard reset. What it looks like today is. Everybody in the outside world is using technology on their own to find things and to engage in things. When Golden launched in 2015, what people knew us for was creating the first apps that would allow anyone of any background to find and participate in acts of service and all their forms. 

So, in-person, virtual skills-based disaster relief, mentorship, donations, et cetera, and to do it instantly and securely. Where that person owns their own data and controls, who gets to see it, and gives every organization permission to see it because of being able to participate in their programs. And when we did that, we eliminated data entry for organizations. 

So, we created dashboards where you would automatically see who’s coming, how long they spend, uh, what was the value of their time according to the independent sector or your own custom rate charts. Uh, what was their feedback, what was their productivity like? How many meals did they serve? Where were they volunteering on behalf of like their company or place of worship? 

And all that data gets permissioned and sent right back to those places so they can collaborate with you in real time and have standardized views into the productivity of the program. So, the result of that is. If you’re running a volunteer program and let’s, say that you sign up for this community plan that we’re offering grants for free, it will take you 15 seconds to sign up. 

From that point, you can organize and publish your volunteer opportunities and even syndicate them in many cases like to AARP or to Charity Navigator and, uh, hopefully to many more partners, certainly to many more partners. But these days we’re getting a lot of inbound interest around that, just having content from our systems syndicate errors, and you don’t have to have separate projects where you go and post opportunities in a million different sites and then get email inbounds and then get in touch with people. 

All that placement and screening and background checking and much more has instantaneously been handled by software like ours. There’s other software I can’t speak to, whether it’s compliant or instant or eliminates data entry, but with Golden you can do all that. You standardize your reporting. 

There are also other versions, that will take all that information and have all your other systems be up to date. So that’s not what, you know, those versions for people who ever want to graduate to it can do it on Golden. Whenever they’re ready, they own all their data and they can make that choice. 

But if you make that choice. You can also automate everything that you do in Salesforce, Blackbaud, Microsoft Dynamics, virtuous Kindful, nation Builder, anything else that you’re using that connects to Golden.  

Tobi: Great. It, it reminds me of a conversation I had with Chris Martin from Team Kinetic in the UK where we had a great conversation about open data sharing amongst volunteer software solutions. 

I’m gonna post that link at, we don’t have time to talk about it right now, but it, there are paradigm shifts happening. My point, paradigm shifts happening in the way we think of software. I mean, I have always contended that that software that we’re using with volunteers should be that the goal of the software should be relationship building. 

Experience elevating the experience, making the experience smooth, making volunteering easier, not harder. And when we do that, the data gets put in and you’re, you’re saying, you know, the paradigm shift is user facing versus staff facing. And folks are used to this, right? We’re all used to this. So, I think it’s time to really look at, and I also think, honestly, you need to think about your own goals and choose a solution that fits your goals, not choose a solution, and then change your organization. 

Unless it has, I’ve done this sometimes where they’re like, oh, look at this benefit. This could allow me to do, you know, with, with our, uh, training in our community, our online training community, LMS systems, oh, this allows me to do something new that I wanted, have wanted to do, but I can’t, couldn’t do before. 

What’s your third quick recommendation for folks that are hesitant around, you know, onboarding a new tech solution?  

Sam: Just to be honest, both individually with yourself and with your organization about what your job is, what you want it to be, which ideally is something like achieving your mission and meeting the needs, right? 

Your job is not just doing the work that was handed to you to do or to fill your day with activities. And so, things like getting in touch with people, coordinating them, screening them, keeping track of things, reporting it. That’s not your job. That’s just interference with what you really want to be doing with your time and what your organization exists to do, especially in moments like these. 

So, if COVID taught us anything, it was that. The needs still exist. In fact, they’re hyped, and the way that you deliver your mission toward meeting those needs to evolve to meet the moment in time, meaning it’s distributed, it has a hybrid, virtual, and in-person angle. It complies with the new regulations and concerns, and the world will continue to change around us. 

It’s just great to build that muscle in your org of knowing that you can meet the needs and you can change with the times.  

Tobi: Yeah, absolutely. Well, first, how can people find you and get in touch if they have questions and where can they find an application to get this software?  

Sam: You can go straight to AmeriCorps relief.org or USA id relief.org and you can complete a ten second questionnaire that will result in you getting access to these free licenses. You can also go to golden volunteer.com if you’d like to see more about what our organization does and who we support. We have the real honor of working with grassroots entities and individuals who just want to do the right thing in their community, all the way up through the institutions that all of us believe in to lead the world forward. 

And that is investment of trust that we don’t take lightly. And we certainly appreciate and honor and have the deepest amount of respect for everybody who’s listening on this podcast and the work that you have the ownership of doing, and that you’ve taken time apart from that to try and learn what you can do next. 

So hopefully we can all be in touch and look forward to meeting you.  

Tobi: Awesome. Fantastic. Well, gang, I hope this was helpful. If you know of an organization that could use leveling up their software or just. Anybody who is struggling with funding right now, why not suggest that they listen to this podcast? 

Because whether, I’m hoping you’ll take Sam up on his offer, but also, I want you to think about how you’re pivoting in today’s world, this is a management skillset. This is a foundational management skillset for every one of us. Right now. It’s not something, you know, we’re just like, oh, it’s turbulence on the airplane. 

No, it’s learning how to fly an airplane in constant turbulence and emerge from it not feeling like you have some control. And when you have a framework for thinking about pivoting and you understand in, you’re leaning in your mission, you will feel you will start that the turbulence won’t bother you as much anymore because you are confident in your ability to help people. 

To help, you know, move your cause forward. And so, I just wanted to add that as a little bit of inspiration. If you like this episode, of course, share it as I said, and join us next week, same time, same place on the Volunteer Nation. Take care, everybody.