Leading Volunteer Programs with a DEI Lens

Change initiatives and improved services and programs designed to meet critical community needs have historically relied on the service of volunteers; comprehensive volunteer programming; and ethical, culturally responsive leadership. Nonprofit/nongovernmental leaders who develop and maintain diversity, equity, and inclusion lens are capable of attracting, engaging, partnering, and maintaining relationships with a much greater segment of the population that is culturally and economically diverse. Strategies volunteer program leaders employ to outreach, message, recruit, onboard, screen, place, supervise, award, recognize, develop and advance volunteers will all be analyzed for their level of inclusivity, cultural responsiveness, and ability to interrupt and remedy historic inequities and harmful narratives. Students will deepen their knowledge about the impact of volunteering in a global context and expand their toolbox of inclusive practices as they apply to volunteer programming.