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Not-For-Profit Organizations : An Analysis Of An Unpaid Board Of Directors

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A vital part of the leadership system in many not-for-profit organizations is an unpaid board of directors or trustees. Often these individuals are bound by a common interest in the goals of the not-for-profit but come from dramatically diverging backgrounds.
Board members are the volunteers who are deeply passionate about driving forward a nonprofits mission, bringing to the table a wide array of varying life and professional experiences and insight. They are unpaid for the time and knowledge that they have dedicated to the nonprofit, but are doing it instead out of their deep belief in the organizations mission.
Policy volunteers are very similar to a board member, as they use their knowledge to enhance a specific project or mission …show more content…

As Hartenian (2007) states,
Nonprofit agencies depend on volunteers. Volunteers can be central to an agency’s core service and possess scarce and important resources: time, talent, and information about clients.
They are central to the organizations success, upkeep of relationships with donors, individuals, and other organizations as well. The volunteer donates much of their personal time, knowledge, and understanding of the community – which are all deeply invaluable to the organization. It is in short, a big job for just the return of a nice pat on the back. Volunteers are not compensated in the same traditional way as an employee is, but they are still known to impact the organization with their monetary value of resources that they pull in for their contributions.
Another type of volunteer is the episodic volunteer; according to Nancy Macduff (1995, 2005) as cited by Brudney & Gazley (2006), an episodic volunteer is someone who gives “service that is short in duration (temporary) or at regular intervals for short periods of time (occasional).” Another way of defining this volunteer according to Michele A. Weber (2002) as cited by Brudney & Gazley (2006), is as those who “contribute their time sporadically, only during special times of the year, or as a one-time event.” They are not volunteers that are regular or consistent in their volunteering and often leave the organization altogether after they

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