188 – Let’s Talk Volunteering with Weave: the Social Fabric Project

November 13, 2025

Episode #188: Let’s Talk Volunteering with Weave: the Social Fabric Project 

In this episode of the Volunteer Nation Podcast, Tobi Johnson shares a webinar featuring Jennifer Bennett of Idealist and Travis Sternhagen, Volunteer Manager at Kinship Community Food Center. The episode delves into the transformative community-centric approach adopted by Kinship, emphasizing mutual aid, trust, and relationships over traditional transactional models of volunteerism.  

Tobi and Jennifer discuss the challenges and strategies involved in fostering a sense of community among volunteers and service recipients alike, highlighting practical steps and profound insights shared by Travis. This episode offers invaluable guidance for anyone looking to reinvigorate volunteer engagement by making it deeply relational and community-oriented. 

Weave the Social Fabric Project  – Episode Highlights

• [02:58] – The Weave Project and Volunteerism 
• [06:54] – Tobi and Jennifer’s Insights on Community Building 
• [08:27] – Travis’ Unique Approach to Volunteer Engagement 
• [15:10] – Kinship Community Food Center’s Philosophy 
• [28:09] – Challenges and Solutions in Volunteer Management 
• [32:07] – Setting Boundaries in Healthy Communities 
• [32:47] – The Compost Metaphor for Community Building 
• [35:59] – Volunteer Influence Beyond the Organization 
• [38:43] – Engaging Volunteers for Long-Term Commitment 
• [42:11] – Audience Q&A: Building Community with Volunteers 
• [49:05] – The Importance of Rituals in Community Building 
• [50:50] – Managing Up and Embracing Community-Centric Approaches 

Helpful Links

• VolunteerPro Impact Lab 
• Volunteer Nation Episode 179 – Transformative Service Experiences with Frederick J. Riley and Jackie Wolven 
• Weave: The Social Fabric Project at The Aspen Institute 
• VolunteerMatch/Idealist  
• Kinship Community Food Center  
• Find Michael on LinkedIn 
• Find Jennifer on LinkedIn  
• Find Travis on LinkedIn  

Contact Us

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

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Episode #188 Transcript: Let’s Talk Volunteering with Weave: the Social Fabric Project 

Tobi: Hey everybody, welcome to the Volunteer Nation Podcast. I’m your host, Tobi Johnson, and today I want to do something completely different. I’m going to share the replay recording of a webinar that I did along with Jennifer Bennett of Idealist, where we were invited to co-host an online conversation with Weave, the Social Fabric Project at the Aspen Institute. 

If you’re interested in Weave and the mission of Weave. You can check out Volunteer Nation episode 179, transformative Service Experiences where I chatted with Fred Riley and Jackie woven, and you can get a deeper look into what weaves all about. But the webinar I’m going to share today was called Let’s Talk Volunteering with The Weave Project. 

And we had an in-depth conversation with. Travis Stern Hagen volunteer manager at Kinship Community Food Center about their organization’s approach to volunteerism and serving the community. I found his perspective and their work entirely unique, and it was a really interesting and refreshing look. 

What regrounds us in volunteering and what volunteering is all about, which is community. Also, I really highly recommend visiting the Kinship Community Food Center’s website. It’s an exceptional example of what the community looks like when we are interacting and engaging with folks online. The photos, the language, the perspectives embrace community in all aspects, and it’s something really to aspire to. 

I really hope you enjoy this replay. Travis has such a bright look on how to integrate folks who are receiving services from an organization, folks who are serving an organization, and folks who are working in an organization, and he really knows how to build community and a deep sense of community and commitment to one another. 

There are specific things they do, strategies, and they do more rituals. That they do each day when they serve folks in their food pantry, in their cafe. It’s just really refreshing. So, if you’re ready for a little inspiration and want to think differently about volunteer engagement, keep listening and enjoy the show. Let’s talk about Volunteering with Weave the Social Fabric Project. I really hope you enjoy it.  

Michael: I am Michael Scholer. If you work with volunteers in any way, I think you’ll enjoy today’s discussion. It’s about how we attract, inspire, and retain passionate volunteers. The volunteers that make our lives much easier, uh, and how we do that by integrating them deeply into the communities that we are here to serve. 

I am a senior director with Weave the Social Fabric Project, which is located at the Aspen Institute. I’m in Washington, dc The Weave Project is a nonprofit that is tackling the problem of broken trust in our country that we feel is kind of the root problem that has left Americans isolated, lonely, and divided. 

We’ve got political gridlock, we’ve got social gridlock, and a lot of that has to do with just a cultural problem of people not feeling like they’re part of something bigger, they than themselves. Part of a, a country, a nation that cares about each other. Weave is a backbone organization. And we’re here to support people like you who are busy weaving neighbors together in communities across the country to try to make life better for everyone. 

One way that we work is by connecting people like you to resources, to ideas, to stories, and to to other folks who can support you or that are, are there kind of for peer support and peer learning, we define weavers. As the people who gather neighbors to work together, creating trust and connection as they get things done in their communities. 

This event is the first of what we hope will be. We will be many where we wanna bring information and resources to folks like you who manage and attract and retain volunteers. We expect to be holding other discussions probably on this, the same topic of how, oh, I need ity. Trust to, to really make extraordinary volunteer experiences. 

And at various points, if you haven’t already kind of signed up through our form to get some resources from Weave, you can go to weavers.org/outreach. If you’re interested in hearing about future events like this or about the resources we have to support people who are managing and working with volunteers, and a colleague will drop that in into the chat. 

Many of you have probably already filled that out, which is why we invited you here. But if you haven’t filled out that form, get on our list so that we know to invite you to other events like this. So, we’re here to really talk about how we reinvigorate volunteerism by making it about relationships and community. 

Weave has a weekly newsletter where we share stories of how people are doing this, how they’re weaving their, their communities together. And in it we also list grants to support your community work and, and other things. Some of you hopefully are already receiving it and seeing the resources that we highlight there. 

If not, again, use that outreach form weavers.org/outreach to tell us you want to get the newsletter. You want to be invited to sessions, discussions, and training like this. So, I am really excited that Tobi Johnson and Jennifer Bennett are here with us to co-host today’s conversation. I expect many of you already know them. 

Tobi is founder and president of Volunteer Pro. She’s written books for volunteer managers. She regularly does training. She consults with nonprofits and she’s got a new book in the works that should come out in the fall. Jennifer is Director of Education and Training for Volunteer Match, which is now recently as a few months ago. 

Part of Idealist and Jennifer has given hundreds of trainings and workshops for leaders like you. Again, I suspect almost all of you have met. Tobi and Jennifer, they will be our dinner party hosts in this session and we’ll keep the conversation flowing. So I will bow out and leave it to Tobi and Jennifer. 

Tobi: Thanks Michael. This is fun. Jennifer and I do a lot of training, so it’s fun to have an event and host an event that’s a little bit different. Then your normal, we’re going to show you slides and train you on our, on expertise around engaging communities and volunteers. So, I’m really excited to be here, and I am excited about what Weave is up to because bringing communities together is sort of the legacy of the nonprofit sector. If you think about it, our big boom was, well, first the Revolutionary War, right? People were coming together not necessarily forming nonprofit organizations but coming together and making things happen and things wouldn’t have happened, and we wouldn’t be the country we are today without people coming together. So, it’s always been part of our fabric. In the seventies, so many people and volunteers started coming together in communities to tackle community problems, and those volunteer groups emerged into some of the nonprofits we see today. If you look at the birth story of almost every single nonprofit, it starts with a group of passionate volunteers from the community. 

I’m glad that Weave is directing us and, and kind of being that compass to bring us back to where community is, why it’s important, and actually highlighting people who are working in community in really purposeful ways. And Travis Stern Hagen from Milwaukee, from Kinship Community Food Center is here and he’s gonna talk about, I just met Travis a few days ago and he’s gonna talk about the unique ways that they build community, and I think it’s gonna inspire you like nothing else can. 

A few weeks ago I posted it, posted an episode in the Volunteer Nation podcast that I host on the number one secret to deep. Volunteer participation, and it really isn’t about our paperwork, our manuals, our tech tools, although those are tools for bringing people together and they can help guide us, it’s really about building trust. 

It’s really about building meaning. It’s about building a safe place for people, even if they don’t vote the same way, can come together and have conversation. So in a minute, Jennifer and I are gonna introduce, or we, we’ve kind of introduced Travis, but we’re gonna bring Travis on and, and start having some conversation with him. 

But we also wanna have conversation with you about how this is landing and how you. See the opportunities in your community, but I wanna hand it over to Jennifer for a minute and hear her perspectives on how community or how important community is in the world today.  

Jennifer: Thanks, Tobi. Thanks, Michael. It’s so fun to be here this morning to have sort of a, big, like a live podcast essentially. Tobi, we haven’t done this in a while. We haven’t, so I wanted to continue on that idea of sort of what brings people to volunteering the role that volunteering can play in building community since. About 2004 volunteer match has been asking the question of prospective volunteers, what are you looking for? 

What are you hoping to get out of your volunteer experience? And overwhelmingly they tell us. Uh, that they want to make a difference in their community and they want to find a cause they care about. And about 78% of the people who answer that question choose that I wanna make a difference in my community. 

And, and that is really, I think, going to what Tobi said and to the mission statement and, and the reason that Weave has started all of this is to help people find that place in their community where they can connect with their neighbors. That it’s not just about doing tasks at a, at a nonprofit. It’s about creating that connection, finding people who care about those things that you care about, care about wanting to make their community a better place. And as Tobi mentioned, we’re really excited to have Travis here talk a little bit more about this today.  

Tobi: So, the thing that I often share with folks I’m training and folks in our community is that volunteers don’t work for, they don’t, don’t volunteer because they want to work for free. 

Yeah. They volunteer because they want to change the world. And doing that, you know, sometimes we treat volunteers when we’re thinking about compliance or paperwork or our onboarding process or risk management or all those things. All those things that Jennifer and I train on that are important, but not what volunteers are really interested in. 

They’re important for our own organizations, but they’re not what volunteers and community are interested in. They really want to change the world. Now, the wonderful thing about community, volunteers and getting together and even self-directing their own projects when they partner with a nonprofit. 

Sometimes the nonprofit has resources that community groups can, can bring to bear, or that community group can use. And sometimes the communities, folks in communities have insights and connections to share with that nonprofit. So, there are synergies between us. I also think sometimes the answer is a self-directed community team, but in the end. 

If we don’t spend time building community, we can expect our volunteers to treat our nonprofits as it as a track transactional or our treat, our volunteer opportunities as a transactional sort of, we set it up that way. That’s how it’s gonna be, right? As a transactional relationship, I give you a few hours, I feel good, I walk away. 

I’m happy about volunteering, but if we want people to lean into Weave’s mission, for example, of strengthening community connection, strengthening our civility, strengthening civic participation, strengthening our ability to get along even when we disagree. We’re going to have people around a little bit more to have deeper conversations and build deeper relationships. So, Travis is really going to share. How can we do that while we help volunteers come in and make a difference. So, it’s really cool. I don’t know, Jennifer, what does this bring to mind for you?  

Jennifer: Well, if I’ve been talking a lot about the role of relationships in volunteer engagement, and one of the exercises and maybe some of the people on our call today have done this with me is, is asking people what makes someone a good friend or a partner or a colleague, and we get these amazing words. 

I like communication skills and loyalty and connection. And then I say, are we treating our volunteers this way? Because this really is a primary relationship. You can’t expect people to have loyalty to you if you don’t have loyalty to them. We can’t expect people to show up for what we need as an organization if we don’t show up for our volunteers. 

And I think, again, this goes to this idea of. Of creating a connection of the idea of using volunteer engagement and finding your community and connecting with people who care about the things you care about as this potential solution to loneliness or this disconnectedness and that comes when we create real relationships with volunteers, that we don’t, to your point, treat them as tools or as transactional, that it really is about inviting people in that warm introduction. So, I think, I think let’s get to the good stuff. Yeah, exactly.  

Tobi: Travis is here. I mean, we’ve kind of given you a big, kind of kicked it off with this sort of big picture view of sort of what is the relevance of this right now. But I think Travis has practical and dare I say, loving sort of ways that folks interact at the kinship community food center, and it’s very purposeful. 

So, Travis, your model. Volunteer engagement feels so radically different than what we see. Can you describe, tell us quickly a little bit about kinship and then describe volunteer engagement and how it might be sort of bucking traditional nonprofit norms?  

Travis: Yeah, I’d love to thank you everyone. It’s fun to be here. The kinship Community Food Center is in Milwaukee, Wisconsin. We’re actually in. A lovely basement in the west neighborhood where we do food distribution. We do a community meal; we do some resourcing with the community. We run an urban farm. We have all these different programs that really are centered on like the nourishment of, of an individual person, but then it becomes so much more than that as well. 

I think maybe the best way to try to frame up what Kinship is doing and like where we went with volunteerism is the organization has existed for over 50 years, but only about eight to 10 years ago did this shift begin. And so, for a long time, for decades, the transaction was the approach, and I’m glad that word already came up of like, well, I have something to give, right? There’s this thing that I bring, and I’m going to give this like this perceived just like needy category of maybe people or whatever it is, or even maybe that that attitude is directed towards the organization, right? Like I bring all of this, like here we go in kinship. 

When that shift began, the language around what community shifted a lot. Right? And, and it was painful, and there was a lot of work to do to bring us to where we are today, but we started to try to communicate everything we did. So whatever program, whatever service we were offering, we tried to always begin by communicating that in community, every single person brings something and needs to receive something. 

So, no matter what your story is, no matter where you come from, when you enter kinship, there’s that reminder of, hey, we must recognize that we all lack something no matter what that is. Like we all have a lack of knowledge that can be met and we can receive something. Then we all bring something to give, and that’s actually the first step. 

So when there’s a lot more to that and how we’ve built it out over the last five years, but initially it just started with, hey, we need to recognize in every person this need to give and receive is being a part of engaging in community. And so that’s how we begin the volunteer journey, right? When someone first enters in for whatever reason, that’s the very first conversation that is had, hey, maybe you did show up thinking, man, I have so many resources, I have so much time, I have so much to give. But you have to pause and then remind yourself to open yourself up.  

Jennifer: I understand you. You even changed your name. Yeah. You taught that about changing your relationship and building a community. Can you tell us a little bit about that? 

Travis: Yeah. Thank you. Yep. And that was intentional. So, originally, we were referred to as the River West Food Pantry, and now we are a kinship community food center. There was an intentionality between the kinship name, right? If you can just think of this like kinship, this familial bond that you can create, even if you’re not by blood, right? 

Connected. And then the food center was an important shift as well where the food pantry language can even carry with it a transactional approach. You can think like, oh, like we’re just distributing food. That’s what we do. We are meeting the need for hunger, but we can boil it down to just that we’re a food center, this community food center. 

We’re supposed to continue to communicate this shift in, in a fostering approach of like, Nope, we all come together. We’re eating together, and we’re distributing food together. And not just meeting the need for hunger but meeting the need of isolation or addressing isolation as well. 

Tobi: That’s lovely. Mm-hmm. I love that idea of mutuality, this concept of mutuality that we’re bringing mutuality. How do you facilitate that, so people are coming with a certain mindset. You know, it might even be saviorism, right? Mm-hmm. And like, I’m here. I’m going to help change the world and folks have never been educated on. 

Maybe that’s problematic, but also there’s a whole different mindset shift now; mindset shift in how you show up and what. How vulnerable you are, uh, what risks you’re willing to take. You’re not standing apart from people. You’re being in a community with people. That is a complete, and that in some ways, initially anyway, because we’re coming out of a pandemic, we still have some social anxiety that we’re, we’re kind of, there’s a challenge to that. 

Creating that. And it takes a little initial push to get through that. And then we start to get the feel goods, the hormone hormones, the, the like, oh wow, this is something different. And I love it, but it’s not always like, oh yeah, we’re going to build community. I’m in. So how do you structure that to bring people along with you? 

Travis: Yeah, totally. And I will, I would love to like double down on like, it’s, it is hard, right? Like I can see the fear in some of our volunteers’ eyes when we like to talk this way at kinship, and we’re inviting them into it. There is this moment where it’s like, hey, I thought I signed up to like, put cans on a shelf and now you’re telling me I’m going to get thrown into this, this community. 

But what, what I’ve seen and what I think is working at Kinship is sometimes there’s this. Question or this attitude where someone walks in and they may even ask a direct question of like, well, where do the volunteers go? Or where do, like what is, who is the volunteer? Who is the person shopping for? Who is this? 

From the moment someone walks in the door, we’re already addressing that through our language. We never have the same line, right? So, everyone’s coming in through the same door. Like there’s even this like physical way of inviting everyone into space in the same way, we ask the same questions no matter what. 

No matter who’s walking in. Even if I know, I’m like, oh, you’ve been here a hundred times. I know you’re probably just here to volunteer. I know you’re probably just here to shop. I’m always going to be asking like. Or are you shopping today? Are you volunteering or are you doing both? Like what, how, how are, is it that you want to engage in this space? 

And then what I, and this is like for me, some of the most beautiful stories come from a volunteer will walk in, maybe they saw us online, or they’re trying to fulfill maybe some hours through their job or through school. And they come in; they sign up for a role. And that could look like it was in, in our food center. 

That could be like, oh, I’m working in the meat department. I’m going to distribute some of the frozen meat items. And then you’re a part of this team, so you end up with these eight people. And at Kinship, because of the work we’ve done to break down these dividing lines of like, who’s the volunteer, who’s not the volunteer. 

About 40% of all our volunteers were originally receiving maybe services from kinship, and then we’re invited in a deeper way in, and so then we didn’t end up on that team of eight. And maybe you’re thinking in your head, oh, there’s a counter that divides me. There are the people I’m serving, I’m the one doing the serving. 

And then you start this conversation next with the person next to you, and you realize. This like aha moment happens where you’re like, oh, wait a second. This? Yeah. No, we’re all just here together. No matter what our background is, it is the wake-up moment for a lot of our volunteers to be like, oh, wait a second. I need to shift the way I’m thinking about the mutual community. Yeah. Or engaging in mutuality. Yeah.  

Jennifer: I’d love to take just a little bit of a step back. I think so many organizations and I think maybe. Uh, organizations that fight food insecurity can fall into this trap a little bit more, become very transactional, right? 

Here’s this big bag of rice. I’m making it into small bags of rice. Here’s this big amount of food. I’m turning it into small amounts of food to pass out to people. At what point, or tell, tell us a little bit about this journey, sort of how did your organization decide to make this change? Because this is not a very common model in your area. 

Travis: Mm-hmm. Yeah, that’s what, thanks for asking that question. So when, so our executive director, Vincent Nth, when he first was asked to take over what was originally just like an, I should be careful what words that choose, you know, like somewhat unorganized group of people that were distributing food and they’re like, Hey, we need someone to just move in as an official staff to like turn this into a nonprofit and take it into the future. 

He came in and he was heartbroken by what he was seeing. So, he was looking around, and he was washing. Folks just hold people at arm length, use a language that was destructive, like in the way they would speak about each other, the attitudes that existed, right? Like there’s even something that starts to break down, I think in us, if we’re only a task and we’re only like serving people that we just view as others, it, I think, hurts us. 

Like if we want to admit that or not. And so that’s when it, that’s what he was trying to address initially was like, when we do this approach, we cause hurt. We’re not, we’re not healing the community. We’re continuing to engage in things that are destructive to the community. And so that was the big first shift was, hey, we need to address this because it’s harmful for everyone. 

Yes, we’re, we’re maybe feeding stomachs and, and hunger and being addressed, but we’re causing some other issues. I want one thing I should probably mention too is that we do a lot of things. The way we organize our events, our volunteer events, like we do a lot of kind of structural things to make sure this is talked about really frequently, but then we also offer like deep dives into our approach where we’re then saying, hey, you’ve been here five times. 

You’re still like, we can see you’re still freaked out. There’s still this barrier. Come to one of our like trainings that we give or one of our workshops and that’s like, work through this together and see and, and talk about what the barriers are. How can we break them down and move closer to one another in a relationship. 

Tobi: Wow, that’s interesting. So let me just ask a follow up question on that. So, you do, do you do any orientation with new volunteers or you kind of bring people on, have them have the experience and then, because that’s a interesting model for learning design, right? Some people think you tell everybody everything and then they go do it, and then they learn. 

But actually, sometimes the more powerful learning experience is. Kind of send people into the fray. You might prep them a little, and then you reflect later like, how is this different than what I thought it was going to be? And that reflection really triggers massive learning in people, especially adults. 

What is your approach to that? How are folks prepped? Are they at all? And then, then it sounds like after folks have had an experience and you’re, and you’re also, you must be doing a fair amount of management by walking around and figuring out and trying to attune to your volunteers and where their chronic psyche’s at in terms of this new, new environment. 

Travis: yeah, our, our orientation upfront is very, very brief. It’s about three minutes where someone will get an email, and they’ll get perking directions, and we’ll like to make sure they know where they’re supposed to enter and who they’re meeting. But then they just get a brief tour of our space, which isn’t huge. 

So, it’s a quick tour. And then I only give them one little piece of orientation, which is on human dignity. So, I just do a quick one minute. Hey, at kinship, it’s chaotic. You’ll see that you’ll engage in the chaos of what we’re going to do, but the thing you must move, go in with is recognizing the dignity and the person next to you and around you. 

And no matter, and I, Tobi, I’m glad you brought up, like there’s so many things that do divide us and kind of cause us to look at someone and say, well, I don’t, I don’t agree with you, so I’m angry with you, or whatever it is. And so we, we framed it up right at the get go. Hey, every person, no matter how they’re walking in, what they think, how they look like. 

There’s this dignity part of it that’s going to exist here, but then you get thrown in. So, then we just kind of push you in and allow for sometimes what we’ve referred to as like kinship, school of generosity, like we were, we, it’s unstructured. It’s like you’re just in there, and you’re figuring it out together, and you’re like kind of workshopping it in real time as you’re volunteering with people around you. 

And then at the end is when we do then sit down for, for actually 45 minutes. We have kind of a lengthy end-of-day orientation that we require all our new volunteers to participate in. Where then we’re, it’s really an introduction to, hey, if, I hope you enjoyed it. That’s ask questions, process your experience, and now like, this is what we’re gonna be inviting you into more if you continue with us. Mm-hmm. But that’s done at the end, after you’ve had the experience.  

Jennifer: Love it. I love it too. And it goes to some of those things that we know about adult learners and putting adults into new experiences that that debrief or reflection time on both positive and challenging experiences can create stronger connections. 

I love that. I want to maybe ask. About when things don’t go as well as they can because I love this, I love this sort of like, welcome in. We treat people, like people here and go for it. But I also like my risk management. My process brain is like, oh no, this, this can have many ways that it can go sideways and. 

We, obviously we don’t need the, the juicy gossip, but maybe more how you approach this and what happens when somebody is not a good fit for that, and you can sort of see that happen early in their experience.  

Travis: Mm-hmm. Yeah. Yeah. Amazing question. So, we this somewhat frequently have moments, right? Where it happens in real time, right? People are shopping. There’s 300 people in our space. It’s hot. We’re all together. Something will, someone will get set off or whatever, right? And this is like the heavy lift of my job. Like I look at most of what I do, and I’m like, oh, like yeah, I’ve got to sit down at the computer and do this. 

I’ve got to address this. But it’s that like a really intense time of engaging, and this is how, and all our staff are really bought into this. So thankfully, like when we have three or four staffs’ staff on site, everyone is addressing these things in real time. But then I guess two, two things I would like to share. 

One is the number of time I’ve asked someone to step away from volunteering. Not much. Like, I think it’s about a dozen maybe times. Oh, I should say it like for a long period of time. We almost always just ask people to take a certain chunk of time and then come back like, hey, think about this. Come back. 90% of those. 

Our relational reasons. Like it’s not because someone like stole from us, it’s not because someone like me and me got like a little violent in space, whatever. It’s, it’s actually more so because I’m recognizing, hey, the way you’re engaging with the people around you is really inappropriate and like, let’s talk about that. 

We have those side conversations. We usually have them in the food center around, oh food. We, that’s like the heart of what we do. We believe food brings people together. So, it’s like, hey, grab a plate of food. Let’s talk about this. What’s going on here? Hey, maybe take a couple weeks away come back. 

Let’s keep looking at this. And I one, and maybe this, I hope this is getting towards your question, but one specific example that I’m going to try to say as vaguely as possible is, yeah, one day it was hot in the food center. You could tell tensions were already escalating, people were cranky, and so we’re trying to keep vibes good. 

We like to laugh. We put on good music. We’re all eating good food. But then there’s a, there’s an argument that begins between two community members and it’s escalating, escalating, escalating. There was a threat of violence, right, where we’re like, okay, like everyone needs to cool down here. But what I think is the most beautiful part of this story is the way it was addressed was fully through relationships. 

We had already built such close relationships with everyone. Mm-hmm. We knew both people. We had known them for years. Yeah. And then we had these side conversations where we said, hey, what’s going on? And we, we actually like utilize that relational rapport that we had. And then, but that. It wasn’t just us, like it was other community members stepping in and saying, hey, you’ve been around. 

You know this is not this type of space. Right? Yeah. As you know, this is a place of love and we’re all tight here together. Before I even arrived to the scene. Right, because that culture has already permeated through. Yeah. Not only volunteers, right, but everyone who is in that space, and so. 

Jennifer: Yeah, but people are invested in the community. It’s important to them, and so they’re willing to. I, this is not the right vibe of the word, but enforce that sort of community togetherness or community standards and norms, right? It’s important to, to everyone, that this remains, this place. That’s, so it’s just amazing. Thank you for sharing. 

Travis: Yeah, of course. Mm-hmm.  

Tobi: It’s, it’s boundary setting, right? Yeah. And when we’re, when we’re in healthy families, for example, or in healthy friendships, when they’re healthy, people are setting boundaries and maintain, and people are respecting boundaries. So, it’s really about, hey, this behavior isn’t inappropriate for this space. 

Or setting a boundary. I love that community, doesn’t really like this, you said folks come. In for years, and you get to know them. Building a community doesn’t, I mean, it doesn’t happen overnight. You, you can’t just like sprinkling like, oh, we just did a great talk. We sat down and had a meal together. We know we’re in ca community together. Like it happens over time. It can’t be forced. You used it when we were talking before you, you use the, the metaphor of composting and I would love to have you share that because it’s such a great metaphor for building community.  

Travis: Thank you. If I could share 30 seconds of even where the origin of the, the metaphor comes from. So, kinship uses this compost metaphor to frame up and direct a lot of how we think of, of community and what we’re building. And it came from like a brainstorming session. We invited in on a dozen folks from the community to sit around and think of like, what image do we want to drive the way we’re doing this? 

And people brought up stuff like, oh, like a table, like a family table where you eat a meal and some others, there were like a lot of ideas around that. Food kind of because, and being a food organization, that’s what comes to mind often. There was a community member there who had shopped on the market for a long time. 

She had her, her story was marked by hardship, and she was there, and she said, it was really hard for me to see myself at that table. Like I’ve lived so much, so much life. That was really tough, and I didn’t feel invited, or I was there and then I got kicked out or whatever it was, and she was the one who presented this idea of the compost, where she was like, the compost, like it’s natural. 

Everyone can you, no matter who you are, you can kind of like, even if you got a little dirt on you, compost is, is approachable to me. And so, then that became this whole thought around the metaphor of compost. And for us, the reason we, we find it so beautiful is it’s the, the, the compost pile, right, is sometimes where the discarded go, right? 

So, like discarded things and things. Maybe you think this isn’t useful. Why? Like the banana peel, right? I’m not going to eat that. I’m going to throw in the compost. But then you’ll put other things in there, maybe intentional, right? You’ll like to add some things to maybe make the process quicker, or you’re like, oh, I need to add some more of this material because it’s lacking this paper product or whatever it is. 

But the end through intentional care of the compost pile, what is produced is the most life-giving soil. And so it’s that, that end goal of like, oh, the work that everyone togetherness, no matter you’re bringing your, your woundedness, you’re bringing your hardship, you’re bringing whatever. 

Become his prosperity, right? That we talk about at kinship, at the end of like, oh, the community is going to be the healthiest it can be because we’re embracing the compost, becoming deep.  

Tobi: I love that. And then you use a little bit of that compost in the next compost file. So, everything breaks down. 

I’m a master gardener, guys. I geek out on compost. But compost comes together to create things like basically black, gold, like beautiful soil. And then. You leave a little bit of soil in that next compost bile to keep it going and to help the new compost bile compost starter, get it started. So, there’s like also when people are in community and they become adept at being in community with one another. 

And they have the right framework, the mindset, and also they start to build skills and in relationship they learn from others and then they’re ready to teach others and influence others. Mm-hmm. Regardless of their role. Whether they’re like somebody coming in and having a meal or somebody coming in and volunteering. It doesn’t matter when you’re in, it starts to influence how you live your life elsewhere, which I think is really cool.  

Travis: If I can share a quick story, there was a like safety. So, I live in the neighborhood. I’m about a block away from the food center, and I went to a safety meeting that the community was having. So, I showed up, sat in the back with my kids. They’re being disruptive, but we’re trying to engage as best as we can and as the conversation’s going, someone in the audience raises their hand and they started to speak and I was like, I recognize this person. I was like she’s been volunteering with us for a long time. 

She’s a neighbor. And the language she was using in that safety meeting the neighborhood was like almost all stuff she had learned at Kinship, right? Like just through some of this. And I was like, this, to me, it was such a beautiful moment because I was like, this is why we exist, right? We want people to go out; we continue to like to change the neighborhoods that they’re in, the communities that they’re in. 

Like you’re not looking to monopolize community, right? Like, like, and I don’t think anyone is right. It’s like, no, go. Let’s see that in all our communities. And it does happen. It does happen, yeah.  

Tobi: Yeah.  

Jennifer: And I imagine too. Seeing it sorts of in the wild, right? The language and the framework and the sort of the language you use to talk about community showing up in another community event or community building place without you having to prompt it was probably really like I know when I hear people echo things that I’ve said about how we treat volunteers or talk about volunteers, I get just a little swell of like, oh yeah, they get it. It’s out there. It’s taking on a life of its own.  

Travis: A hundred percent. Yeah. And. Being in the neighborhood, and this is if, I hope I’m not jumping too far ahead or anything, but like my strongest encouragement to anyone who’s like looking at the game. Even this journey of like, oh, I, I want to figure out how to make our volunteer space feel really like community is, you must live it out yourself. 

Like you must be like modeling it, leading in it. And it is a little intense, right? It can be a little scary because you have to do that, own your own work to figure out why, why am I holding people at arm’s length? In my neighborhood. It’s been like the reward of it though is unlike anything I can even express. 

Right? I can share hundreds of stories of how I’ve gotten this feeling, how like. This work in, in myself and in our community has created this, this better neighborhood. Like it’s, it’s incredible to look around and see, oh man, it’s because I know my neighbor so well and I’m walking this journey with them. 

Tobi: Mm-hmm.  

Travis: That this is so life giving at this point. 

Tobi: Speaking about community, and I think it’d be great to open it up to the audience and and hear their questions as we do. Folks, if you have questions, you can either raise your hand and unmute and we’ll call and you can unmute, or you can type your question in the chat either way. 

And while we’re doing that, I know that the volunteer managers here are wondering, probably Travis, what’s your volunteer retention rate? So, so in terms of building community, we always expect community to be a long time kind of investment people make. Do you find that. When you build community that that results in volunteers investing long-term with each other, with your community residents, with your staff. 

Do you find those relationships end up long-term?  

Travis: Oh yeah. Very much so. We, and I don’t have the exact numbers, but usually it’s like five to 10% of our volunteers are new, every given event. So that means 90% ish, depending on the event, are people returning. And I really think it’s because of the relationship part of it. 

For sure. Yeah. Like absolutely love their friends. They love hanging out with people they love. And so even if that means. They’re cooking food or distributing groceries. Like as long as they’re around people, they know care about them and that they care about, they’re not going anywhere. They will. They want to be like, very much want to be a part of it. 

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Well, let’s see if anybody has any questions. As we said at the beginning when we kicked off, we’d love to really have a two-way conversation here, and I see some folks in the chat or in the participant list that I know. 

How did you start building this community? So, we talked a little bit about your aha moment at the organization. When was the shift from the community or Samantha? Are you speaking of the community with service folks that they’re serving, and are you talking about the community with volunteers? 

I think that might be helpful. So let’s see what Samantha says. Yes, mostly volunteers. So maybe Travis, it might be helpful to share a little bit. We’ve got a few questions coming in, so that’s fantastic, and I know we’re going to be ending at the top of the hour. So just briefly, you had ex, did you have experience as a volunteer manager prior and were you approaching it the same way, or what was the key and how did you make the shift to building community? 

I guess maybe that that’ll help Samantha understand your experience.  

Travis: Yeah, I hope I am answering the question and I saw another one pop up, so I think I might be able to address a couple of them is like in that initial shift, which I only have really been able to hear about because that was just Vincent and right, like some of like, there was like this core group of two, three people and that initial shift I know was started by bringing people all into that, right? 

So, like. Literally the first step is like, oh, I can’t just think in my own team and room about community and how to build that in a volunteer space. I need to be already at the very get go, have a table of all my top volunteers, whoever they are. You could use it numerically. You could just say, oh, this is the person who’s been around the longest all around a table saying, how are we going to do this? 

Like, how, what do you think is going to be the best? How would you have wanted to be invited initially into a community like this? And then I, I saw one question pop up about like, I think it had something to do with like, how did we get people to be cool with the change? And like, and I will say unfortunately, some people weren’t right. 

So like, there’s a reality of like, some folks were like, Nope, I don’t want to do this work. I didn’t sign up till like, work on myself. I didn’t sign up to like to engage in this community. I just wanted to like spoon food on a plate. And that was tough, and, and, and, and folks like some were around for the journey and loved it and have only become closer. 

Some folks, aren’t they? They decided they weren’t wanting to be part of that journey, which is perfectly fine. I, I hope that addressed the question.  

Tobi: I really appreciate that acceptance. Also, acceptance is part of being in the community as well, that not everybody’s going to. Accept the direction of an organization that leans into community. 

And when you said like, I didn’t sign up to work on myself, well, you can’t be in community, in a healthy community anyway unless you’re willing to work on yourself. Like setting boundaries, for example, is not easy and having a heart difficult conversation, not easy. So, when you think about your best friends in the world. 

You had at some point a difficult conversation in with them. With family members. You might have had it falling out, but if you have it, if you’ve built a healthiness, not saying every relationship is healthy, but if you have, then that takes work and effort, emotional work, emotional labor, and some volunteers are into passive volunteering versus active emotional labor. 

Within their volunteering and you’re modeling that with your emotional intelligence, you’re able to model that. I mean, that’s a skillset, a very important skillset to pull this off. Right? So interesting. What other questions? Jennifer, do you have any questions you’d like, and you’d like Travis to answer? 

Jennifer: Yeah, we have a great question from Susan who asks, can you gimme an example of how your language has changed before and after, sort of that movement from a food pantry to the kinship center?  

Travis: Mm-hmm. Yeah. I gave one example of how we address like almost our grieving. Yeah. There’s, and this still exists, and it’s something that does sort of frustrate me, is like, we always want to use titles like titles for people, like a shopper, a volunteer, and I’m always trying to be like, we’re all community members. Some of us shop, some of us volunteer. Like that can be the like tag at the end, but like, and, and it’s tough, right? 

I think how we speak sometimes can be. Tough to always embrace like a language shift. But then we do, so I don’t know if this is helpful or gets to the question, but we do two very intentional moments. Every volunteer event where we do a community huddle, so it’s, everyone’s a part of it. So, there isn’t a side volunteer huddle. 

You’re, you’re not pulling people out into the side, everyone’s together. So, it’s either me, Vincent, someone’s on the microphone, and we practice the language. So we, we say welcome to Kinship. We’re a community of, and we make everyone say generosity together, right? So we unify ourselves around that language, and then we rehearse again, giving and receiving commitment to community. 

Vincent likes to use the image of a cake. He’s like, you can’t bake a cake without flour. You can’t have a community of generosity without receiving, without giving. Like, these are the ingredients that are required. And so I hope that’s getting to the, to the question of like some of the language that was shifted where, and then we, we. 

Don’t let up. So we just continue every single time we’re open people. I’m sure the person who’s been there a thousand times is like, please stop with this. But it’s like we have to,  

Tobi: so you do it at the beginning of with, with community members, volunteers, staff, everybody who comes in at that. At the beginning. 

Mm-hmm. And you just whoever’s there at the moment. And how long are you open for usually?  

Travis: So we. We open the doors for four hours. Okay. We do, we do a service for two, but based on our culture, it’s like everyone’s in right When the door opens and then everyone’s in, is we’re having to basically kick people out at the end, like, Hey, I wanna get home to my kids, that huddle, it’s, it’s even pulling the people from the back rooms. Someone’s in the back, they’re stocking a shelf somewhere. Hey. Community huddle’s about to begin, like, get out here, be a part of this with us. Oh, and then I forgot to mention the closing ones. Then at the very end, which whoever’s still around, right? 

Again, it’s not saying, Hey, volunteers, go into that room. We’re gonna do the closing huddle. Whoever’s around can join. We actually get into a circle and then we, we, we just ask the question, what did you receive today? We allow that to be open. I try to frame it up by saying like, it could be a story, it could be like whatever. 

And then we spend about 15 minutes just allowing people to, to say that verbally. And it’s one of the most beautiful moments of my day whenever we do that. And the stories that come up from that is where you. Sometimes I don’t even see all of those school generosity moments, but they’ll come up in that moment. 

I’ll be like, I didn’t even know those two people knew each other. And they had this incredible moment where they ate together and shared life.  

Tobi: The, the thing about ritual and it’s rich, the rituals, they’re, they’re, so the thing about ritual that’s so wonderful, especially for newcomers. Is that it creates a sense of safety. 

Mm-hmm. Because they absolutely know every time I come, this is gonna happen. Now I can see how some volunteers would be like, well no, if I’m a passive volunteer, if I’m just here to. Fill the cup of somebody else, then I don’t wanna give of myself. ’cause I don’t need my cup filled. Which is too bad because as you said, everybody lacks and everybody has resource. 

So that ritual though, for people who are coming and, and they’re like, what’s gonna happen? ’cause community can be chaotic. Ugh. My anxiety level, but oh, there’s a ritual. There’s a ritual. So yeah, that’s a big, that’s an important trust building strategy.  

Travis: And I apologize, but if I can say one thing and add on is like representation is so important as well, right? When someone on our staff was originally shopping in the market is on staff, or when someone who’s like coming into a space, they say, Hey, in society I’m like one of the most rejected, or there’s this thing that’s happening in my world where I feel the most rejected. And they see that person on staff, right? 

And they or they hear a story of someone who’s volunteering and they say. Hey, me and you both, right? Like we’re in this together, like, and that’s why our staff is built the way it is. Even though we were started in a Catholic church. We come from every faith background. We represent a lot of different communities, socioeconomic communities, and so it’s, yeah. 

I was just going to add, that is like a part of, I think what’s making kinship also successful is just everybody’s on the leadership team. Everybody’s on staff representations in person.  

Jennifer: Travis, it sounds like your executive director and your board sort of drove this change. We’re getting some questions from people who maybe need to do some coalition building or consensus building or even. 

Driving some conversation in their organization about the value of this type of community building and volunteer engagement with community at the forefront. What’s something you could share either about the Kinship Center or about your personal philosophy that might help somebody start this conversation in their own organization? 

Travis: Where my brain was immediately going, was thinking about it sort of in my, like a personal story of. Of being in two different worlds. I, this is my second career where I’ve, or job where I’ve been working in volunteer management and the first one was purely about the task, the job at hand. And, and the reason I switched jobs was because I couldn’t do it anymore. 

I was so burnt out. I was so, like, I felt isolated, right? I was in a job where I was supposed to be building this, this team, and I didn’t feel like I was on a team. I felt like I was just. Punching numbers and then became a part of kinship. And I got to experience, like I addressed this a little bit earlier, like the, the true joy and the life giving. 

That this brings, that being a part of an organization that embraces this approach to community volunteering service, like all of it. Like I just feel I’m a better father, I’m a better neighbor. Like the, the reason I would encourage someone to, to, to begin this journey and just. Begin in the quiet of your own home, right? Start your own links, start thinking it through is because I really, I believe so deeply in its impact on the individual and on, on our, our, our neighborhoods and our cities as well. Does that answer the question? Yeah. I think I touched a  

Jennifer: little bit that at some point there was a conscious decision made and that it was okay if some volunteers didn’t want to do that. Right. That there was not this like feeling that we had to make everyone comfortable. Mm-hmm.  

Travis: Yeah. And you’ll actually will do the opposite. You will make people uncomfortable. It’s guaranteed That’s, that is the, the most chaotic thing about embracing this community approach is because when you’re inviting everyone in, you’re inviting all of who they are in. And so when you are bringing your full self, when you’re asking someone to bring their full self there, there will be some rawness to it. Mm-hmm. But I am convinced the reward is, is well worth.   

Jennifer: Your 90 to 95% returning volunteer rate might be a good basis for a conversation if you’re having some buy-in challenges within your organization, because just saying that’s pretty darn impressive. Mm-hmm.  

Tobi: Yeah. Yeah. It is. It is difficult. I think I do want to acknowledge having been in top-down command and control type organizations that there is. There is a release of power or a shift in power dynamic that happens when you are community centric and grassroots to grass tops. In terms of who has a say in decision making, in terms of how we identify people. And as a leader of volunteers, folks are questioning in the chat a little bit about managing up. You decided for yourself, look, I, I, this is what I need for my life. I need to be nourished. I don’t need to be burned out. I need to feel in connection. 

So, I’m going to find a community, an organization that does that. And that’s one choice. And I’ve done that myself at. Points where I’m like, okay, I am kind of done on this durable wheel. The other is to start the conversation, and I always think, first, people don’t really know if you’re a volunteer manager; people don’t really know what you’re doing. 

They don’t know what you’re doing. So, you can start changing the way that you are philosophical. See volunteers, you can change the way that you write up your handbook. You can change the way this or that. Yeah. The challenge though is that at some point those volunteers will. Will come up against a power dynamic that doesn’t feel right given the way that you’ve set things up. 

So it is important to start having the conversation and start having the conversation with your direct supervisor and go from there. But at the same time, you can always form advisory. Groups to help make decisions in the design of your program. Nobody, nobody’s going to stop that from happening. Well, maybe, but it is a philosophy, the organization. 

I also think when organizations are stating their values. And their mission. It’s a great time to interject and ask, so how are we living these values that we are purporting to when it comes to volunteers? And so if a value is trust, how are we building trust with a and start just asking questions about what the organization is claiming to be its personality or its sort of re on debt. 

So, but yeah, it’s challenging, and some organizations are never going to get there. They’re just not, because they’re invested in what they’re invested in, and it’s working for them for whatever reason. Right. And people are afraid. Your organization and the way it’s approached, has shown, demonstrated that this works. 

Right? Working in community work right now. In fact, any time people would question the value of community, now is the time that people would say now of any time in recent history. That community is absolutely essential. Mm-hmm. To our survival as a society. And so that, I think we can make that argument too. 

Jennifer: Yeah. And Tobi, I love Tobi’s advice of like, just go rogue. I would say maybe my advice would be to think about your own personal volunteer engagement philosophy. What matters to you? Where do you draw your lines? And then with our last couple minutes here, Travis, what would be your sort of parting piece of advice? 

Travis: Oh man. Yeah, I think my parting piece of advice. Would be that I think this is so much more beyond even us, right? I think when I think of the conversation we’re having, even though we’re framing it up in volunteer management, it’s a conversation that needs to be had everywhere, right? It’s going to impact how you interact with people that you’re shopping next to at a grocery store. It’s going to impact, right? Like so much of what we’re talking about, what’s beautiful about it to me is. Applicable Everywhere. Everywhere. Yeah.  

Jennifer: Mm-hmm. All right. Well, we’re almost at time, so I want to turn this back over to Michael.  

Michael: Um, Tobi and Jennifer, and Travis. Thank you. This has been a beautiful conversation and a beautiful hour together. 

Really, really appreciate all your time on this, what we’re talking about. It’s so important to activate volunteer networks and create passionate volunteers, but it’s also, as Tobi and Jennifer have said, it is so important to actually heal a very isolated and divided society. And I, I think my, my message to everyone is the work you’re doing in your communities with volunteers is. 

The most important work we can do now because frankly, not much is probably going to happen at a national level, but at a community level, we can create strong, supported communities and, and, and those communities will be the seeds for bringing this nation together again in a, in a strong and humane way and, and making us the light that we’ve always been to rest of the world. 

So, thanks for joining us. Thanks everyone for coming. Drop some messages in the chat. If you aren’t on your list, put yourself on your list. We hope to be having more sessions like this and we have lots of stories of what people are doing to weave their communities together in our weekly newsletter. And that form will also get you there. 

So, thank you everyone. I really appreciate it, Tobi. Jennifer, thanks for leaving this conversation for us.  

Tobi: I hope you really enjoyed this panel discussion about how to create a sense of community and our replay of Let’s Talk volunteering with Weave, the Social Fabric Project. I think there is so much to learn and so many new ways to approach how we engage the community and how we interact with one another. 

And I think this episode and Travis’s comments really show us the way. So if you like this episode, I hope you share it with a friend or give us a rating or review. I love those five-star ratings y’all. And if you’re ready to listen again, join us next week, same time, same place on the Volunteer Nation. 

Take care, everybody.