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The VSys Voices

Valuable Advice for Volunteer Managers

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Webinars

2020 Webinars
Subject - Watch Online! Date Download link Handouts
Emergency Volunteering November 15, 2020 Download
Managing Up October 14, 2020 Download
Virtual Volunteering September 23, 2020 Download

Meet the VSys Voices

Karina Vargas

Karina Vargas, CAVS, CompTIA Project+ has over 20 years of experience in volunteer management in a variety of settings, she is no stranger to the world of giving and serving. She has experience at all levels of volunteering, ranging from working with Board-level professional volunteers to high school students wanting to get exposure to potential career paths. She spent over ten years managing volunteers for a large children s hospital in Southern California where she developed volunteer leadership programs, presented interactive customer service trainings, and provided expert-level technical and leadership support to their volunteer program. She worked closely with the VSys team to optimize her organization s use of VSys One, and her suggestions led to several improvements of VSys One software.

Karina is a Certified Administrator of Volunteer Services (CAVS) and holds a bachelor s degree in Human Services from California State University, Fullerton. In Fall 2021, after completing a certification in project management, she joined VSys One as a Solutions Architect. In this role she merges her healthcare volunteer management experience, her technical abilities, and her love for helping people and programs grow.

Roseanna Galindo

Roseanna Galindo, ECBA, CAVS, is a business analyst with 30+ years of experience in leadership in volunteerism, both in practice and in research. Her work, the "Development of the Volunteer Satisfaction Index (VSI): Construct Definition, Measurement, and Validity", was published in the Journal of Social Service Research. The VSI has been used worldwide by both scholars and professionals pursuing a deeper understanding of the volunteer experience.

Roseanna has administered volunteer programs in a variety of nonprofit industries. In her previous role as Director of Volunteer Services at Enloe Medical Center she was a patient experience leader who worked to establish the value of volunteer impact. She is also a VSys One superuser!

Roseanna was recently awarded a course certificate in Data Analytic Science through California State University, Chico and received an ECBA credential through the International Institute of Business Analysis. Roseanna earned her master's degree in organizational communication from CSU, Chico where she has been an intermittent faculty member for over 25 years.

Currently, Roseanna works with organizations to empower decision makers to better communicate with data. She is Principal at Periscope BPA and provides training in communicating with data through storytelling. She is a champion of data literacy, the human experience in healthcare, and volunteer leaders everywhere. Check out her blog at https://www.periscopebpa.com/blog-insighter.

Joan Cardellino

Ms. Cardellino has extensive experience engaging volunteers and community forces for good. From the arena to the C-suite , she has expertise with a broad range of management, organization, and program development skills. She is called upon frequently to serve as a volunteer engagement pundit, coach, trainer, speaker, consultant, conservator, innovator, and conscience. Her current focus is strengthening volunteer leadership management and organization structures, from traditional top-down structures to self- governing sociocracies, especially digital visions and strategies.

For more than 13 years Joan managed a California Hospital Association statewide network of hospital volunteer programs reaching 100,000 volunteers. Her responsibilities included production of an annual conference and educational events; staffing the state's Committee on Volunteer Services; creating new products, seminars and/or publications; regular consultations with more than 400 member hospitals; and forming and maintaining strategic alliances, joint ventures and community partnerships at the local/regional/state/national/international levels to advance volunteerism in hospitals. Prior to her work in California, Joan served for 15 years as the director of volunteer resources at Abington Memorial Hospital in Pennsylvania; director of training and staff development, director of youth services, and regional branch administrator for the Southeastern Pennsylvania Chapter of the American National Red Cross, and service as a Peace Corps volunteer in Tunisia.

Joan holds a BA in sociology from Northeastern University; a graduate business certificate in health care administration and marketing from Temple University; a graduate business certificate in leadership development from UCLA (University of California, Los Angeles) Anderson Executive Education Center, and a certificate in fundraising from the Association of Fundraising Professionals. She has a Certified Administrator of Volunteer Services (CAVS) credential from the Association for Healthcare Volunteer Resource Professionals (AHVRP), and is an active leader of many professional associations including AL!VE (Association of Leaders in Volunteer Engagement), DOVIA Sacramento (Directors of Volunteers in Agencies), National Volunteer Caregiving Network, and the National Alliance for Volunteer Engagement.

Dana Litwin

Dana Litwin, CVA is a transformational coach, strategic advisor, and public speaker with a background in team building, environmental conservation and sustainability. She is known for her Priceless Advice series with tips for Volunteer Leaders.

Since 2002, Dana has guided organizations in the Bay Area, Silicon Valley, and nationwide to produce breakthrough volunteer and community engagement programs, as well as board and advisory committee development. She served for over eight years as the Volunteer Programs Administrator of the Open Space Authority of Santa Clara Valley, where she produced large scale public events, redesigned volunteer/outreach program policies and procedures, trained volunteers and staff, build partnerships and relationships to further volunteer opportunities and fundraise, and represented the organization at public events and conferences.

Drawing upon 20+ years in improv theater, Dana delivers innovative, humorous and engaging keynote addresses and seminars, in addition to customized training, educational materials and multimedia presentations. Ms. Litwin has a BA in Music and Jazz Studies from Sonoma State University. She is a Certified in Volunteer Administration by the by the Council for Certification in Volunteer Administration (www.ccva.org) and is an active leader of many professional associations including AL!VE (Association of Leaders in Volunteer Engagement) where she served as the President of the Board of Directors and the National Alliance for Volunteer Engagement where she serves as a Facilitator.

Todd McMullin

Todd McMullin finished his degree in Non-profit Business Administration in 1993 and embarked on a journey to improve the world. Within 3 years he had founded a United Way chapter, a Volunteer Center, and a software company focused on volunteer recruiting & management.

Following 9/11 he founded the Disaster Help Network (DHN) which ultimately provided volunteer systems and consulting that covered 35% of the US population, including metro Dallas, Phoenix, Tucson, and over 100 chapters of the Medical Reserve Corps and Citizen Corps. DHN was the official response system for Florida and Alabama during the '04 hurricanes.

Todd has designed, deployed or supported volunteer engagement systems for the Smithsonian Institution, USO, Disney Worldwide Services, multiple state governments and hundreds of schools, NGO's and shelters.

In 2007 he co-founded the Association for Leaders in Volunteer Engagement (AL!VE) and in 2017 helped organize the National Alliance for Volunteer Engagement. He has become an outspoken advocate for peer-to-peer engagements that are self-assessed and networked so that communities can grow organically from within. Todd brings experience with multiple volunteer management software solutions and an overall vision for the future of volunteerism to the Voices.

Resources

Resources for Digital Care Circles

Digital Care Circles: The Future in Volunteering?

A chance encounter with volunteering legend Susan J. Ellis in a New York City hotel lobby during the 1997 Points of Light conference sets the stage for the start of this three-part series on Digital Care Circles: The Future in Volunteering?

In this feature series, author Todd McMullin with Dana Litwin and Joan Cardellino first explain the concept of Digital Care Circles and why they go beyond peer-to-peer engagement by helping volunteers create and manage their own care circles of peers around the people, causes, topics and communities they care about. Later in the series, additional articles by McMullin, Litwin and Cardellino will expand on socialized outcome measuring, the science behind modern trends, meta-governance, the national platform concept and how to do all of this while harnessing, focusing, measuring and managing collectively and collaboratively.

The authors promise a deeper dive into ways we can all work together to bring these new ideas to fruition. And they suggest some pathways forward for Volunteer Engagement Leaders to consider as we transition programs to a new way of thinking.

Download the PDF article here, or you can read this article in its entirety on the Engage website.

Transforming To Digital Care Circles

Global Giving Platform Introduction

New tools for Measurement

From Joan Cardellino

Articles

Sites/services we recommend

EveryoneReady.info: Trainings for Volunteer Managers

CyberSeniors.org Resources for engaging older volunteers virtually

energizeinc.com Energize: Management Resources for Directors of Volunteer Programs

volunteeralive.org Al!ve - Association of Leaders In Volunteer Engagement

engagejournal.org/ Engage: The global voice of leaders of volunteer engagement

all4engagement.org National Alliance for Volunteer Engagement

Fascinating research