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Amy Lesnick, Executive Director of Full Circle Fund, joined a prestigious panel at the Annual Corporate Philanthropy Summit & Awards on Thursday, July 17, to speak about skill-based volunteering, an emerging trend of which Full Circle Fund sits at the forefront.

The panel also included Gwyneth Borden, IBM; Juliana Deans, Deloitte; Joel Bashevkin, Taproot Foundation; and moderators John Power, The Volunteer Center and Colin Lacon, Northern California Grantmakers.

Although gathering a group of volunteers to a school to paint a wall for a day is helpful, all the members of the panel agreed that skilled professionals could be leveraged to make a greater impact with their volunteer time. All panelists gave examples of what their organizations are doing to facilitate this. Juliana Deans from Deloitte (and a Full Circle Fund member!) spoke about their annual “Center for Leadership & Community”. Each year Deloitte staff runs a workshop to train nonprofit professionals in auditing, proposal writing, and coaching for peak performance. Taproot’s West Coast Executive Director, Joel Bashevkin, spoke about how Taproot trains and coaches skilled volunteers to work on service grants for nonprofit organizations ranging from strategic development to customized databases to marketing tools, like Full Circle Fund’s website!

As with other panelists, Full Circle Fund has accumulated a vast repository of institutional knowledge on effective cross-sector partnerships and the best practices that enable them to be successful. When asked how to ensure that skill-based volunteer engagements are effective, Amy Lesnick recommended the following:

1. Instill in your volunteer corp a culture that embraces and respects diverse perspectives and can leverage the skills, resources, and experiences of both nonprofit and private sector team members
2. Clearly define the project’s scope, measurements of success, expectations, and milestones
3. Ensure that the project is core to the nonprofit’s strategic objectives and that everyone is committed to invest the time and resources to ensure success.

The panelists also shared best practices for engaging both volunteers and the nonprofits that need them in skills-based projects. Gweneth Borden from IBM shared that it sometimes takes time to open up the nonprofits to embrace those who want to help. There was a shared sentiment that nonprofits do not always have the capacity to host volunteers or the knowledge of how to utilize their skills. In response to the question from a nonprofit practitioner of how her organization can learn to engage corporate philanthropists, Joel offered the website doitprobono.org and their developing best practices resources for nonprofits.

Posted in Corporate Philanthropy Summit & Awards, Taproot Foundation, Deloitte, San Francisco Business Times, Amy Lesnick, event