Serve America Act: Better Volunteerism or Just More?

As we have conversations at Change.org about how we spur people to action, one of the constant tensions is between scale or quality. While that's probably a false dichotomy, and what we actually need is more better volunteers, how one goes about promoting service does, to some extent depend on the trade-offs you're willing to make."Volunteer Days" or "Service Days" (like the recent MLK Jr. Day of Service President Obama was promoting) are a clear example of having a bias towards numbers of people serving - in the hopes of inspiring more sustained engagement.

The New York Times recently wrote an editorial urging President Obama and Congress to pass the Serve America Act, which would increase the scope of the AmeriCorps program and provide more stipends for people willing to serve full time. It would also provide employer tax incentives and a host of other things like that which make it easier to integrate service into one's life.

I'm all for this. But I think that we as a sector in general haven't really figured out the best ways, in general, to harness different types of volunteer capacity. Outside of certain organizations who've made a concerted effort to learn how to utilize volunteers (animal shelters might be a good example?) there aren't easy rubrics to figure out what type of skills and commitment levels are suited to what types of work, how best to manage and set tangible outcomes for volunteers, how to utilize pro-bono skilled labor, how to measure volunteer impact, etc. That's not to say that there aren't great attempts and case-studies in all these areas. There just seem not to be, at least from what I've seen, good accessible best practices available for most nonprofits to learn from.

I would love to see the Serve America Act and other attempts like it incorporate both organizations who've set out to make volunteerism work better (like the Taproot Foundation, which makes "service" grants of donated pro-bono skills), as well as some standard format for aggregating and sharing lessons so that they build the capacity of the field as a whole. If anyone knows of efforts like this, I'd love to hear about them.