New Survey: The State of Volunteering in North American Jewish Not-for-Profit Organizations

Repair the World has issued the results of a new survey, “The State of Volunteering in North American Jewish Not-for-Profit Organizations”.

This is the first major assessment of the state of volunteering in the Jewish nonprofit community. More than 200 Jewish nonprofit organizations from across the country participated in this survey and the results establish important baselines for the field. The results also highlight opportunities for Jewish organizations to make use of volunteering best practices.

The top-level findings generally support the hypothesis that volunteering programs provide more benefits for organizations that support them with intentionality and investment:

• The better a Jewish nonprofit organization supports its volunteers the more it benefits from them: Organizations that report increased use of the best practices for supporting volunteering find directly proportional benefits in capacity, impact and cost savings.
• Volunteer managers drive volunteer growth: Volunteer participation numbers are more directly connected to having dedicated volunteer management than to any other variable, including even an organization’s size and its enthusiasm for volunteers.
• Training drives benefits: Having any kind of volunteer training program more than quadruples the benefit of volunteers through increased organizational capacity and impact.
• Jewish volunteers are tackling Education and Poverty Alleviation: Education and poverty alleviation are, by large margins, the most common social issues Jewish nonprofit organizations address through their volunteers.

The full report is available for download here.