How hard is it going to be to educate nonprofits on how they might use micro-volunteering to improve their bottom line – and make change on the ground? This post by Allison Fine on PDF dives into the subject matter.
In the post, Fine poses some challenging questions to our line of work, such as:
"It is quite possible that we will become frantically busy doing a lot of change stuff that does make the doers feel great (which is important ) but doesn’t add up to the systemic social change needed in communities. Does busy mean the same thing as impact?"
That sure hits the nail on the head. I think we can point to some conclusive examples where micro-action turns into something world-changing, such as Wikipedia, for example. With thousands of small edits and additions per day, the sum of those parts results in a tremendous resource for all of us. And it has surely delivered a lot of value to nonprofits. The case that micro-volunteerism can generate value for nonprofits seems very clear cut. The broader question of systemic-social change is another matter. And I don't think there's any good answer there – other than to say that microvolunteerism can be only one part of a larger puzzle – and that it's not going to happen without real boots on the ground and people looking into the eyes of other people.
ps. how often do you see a blog post leap off the screen with prose like this?
"The aging royals, grayer and more stooped than I remembered, were huddled awkwardly beneath of the towering shadow of our shimmering, still-under-warranty, kinetically energetic new President and First Lady."
pps. props to Social Actions for experimenting with Twitter. Really cool stuff.
