TurningPoint 2012-National Conference on Volunteering and Service

CTEP program staff had the wonderful opportunity to attend this year's National Conference on Volunteering and Service in Chicago, IL from June 18th to 20th, 2012.  The conference is an annual event held by the Points of Light, a leader in service sector innovation in the nation that was originally created by President George H. W. Bush. For three days, we gathered with more than 5,000 volunteer and service leaders from the nonprofit, corporate and government sectors.  We were provided a space at the conference to innovate new ideas for service, share our challenges and explore solutions. I came back with a renewed sense of passion and purpose from three days of inspirational stories and encouraging outcomes from service leaders across the nation.

Not only did I enjoy my time in engaging other service leaders and hearing inspiring speakers like Kevin Bacon, J. R. Martinez, and Barbara Bush-I was able to attend conference sessions to continue my education as a Program Director of an AmeriCorps program.  My favorite session was "The Scarce Resource Model for Measuring the Return on Investment (ROI) of Volunteer Engagement".  It sounds a little wonky, but it was refreshing to learn ways to better measure our program efficiency and valuing volunteer time when measuring the "bang for the buck" of our program for the community and potential funders.  Simply, I took away a renewed energy to investigate how we can spend our volunteer's time as "thriftily" as we spend our dollars!