The Future of Volunteering: Skills Based Volunteers

Having now completed its third tax season, NCTC’s Skills Based Volunteerism (SBV) initiative is looking to the future. With the goal of building the capacity of participating organizations to serve more clients through highly-skilled volunteers, the program’s results show that 2012 has been an unqualified success.

Started with support from Bank of America and now E-Trade Financial, the Skills Based Volunteerism program seeks to build the capacity of the asset-building field by increasing the number of active volunteers through a scalable framework.

Some of the results from the 2012 tax season: 

• The SBV program recruited and matched highly skilled volunteers in 16 locations around the country
• Together, these volunteers gave more than 500 hours of their time to their communities
• Volunteers served more than 600 clients, providing on-the-ground asset building services to help families move toward a path of financial security

Realizing the importance of making volunteering an easy process for both getting started and staying involved, diversified training approaches were developed to make it easier to train volunteers through the NCTC Online University.

Plans are already being laid to expand skills based matching strategies to programs that offer year-round services to boost levels of engagement and number of clients receiving service.

To learn more or become involved with the Skills Based Volunteerism project, visit the SBV web page.

By Rebecca Riha, Project Manager

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