Shortly after Barry Elkins’ last child moved out of the house, he and his wife moved to New York City in 2012. With newly found free time, Elkins started volunteering through the local Jewish community center, the Marlene Meyerson JCC Manhattan. When he was sent to volunteer at a nearby senior day care facility, he noticed that many seniors had iPhones, but didn’t know how to use them. He decided to help out.

“All of the sudden there was a line of people behind me, like I was giving away free roast beef sandwiches or something,” Elkins told eJewishPhilanthropy. “I started to think this could be a really wonderful opportunity.”

At the JCC, Rabbi Brian Fink, who directs its Engage@Wechsler volunteer service corp, was looking for a way to harness baby boomer-aged volunteers who were looking for new ways to contribute to their community as part of the center’s participation in UJA-Federation of New York’s “Time for Good” volunteering initiative, which concluded last month. 

“We got to bring together volunteers as leaders and say, ‘Well, what are you interested in?”’ What kinds of things would you like to be doing? What kind of skills do you have? What did you do in your career?” Fink said. “That led us to kind of have new ideas emerge, the things that we never would have thought of,” he said.

One of these was Elkins idea: TechSoup. Through the initiative, which launched in 2014 and received a grant from UJA-Federation of New York, tech-savvy older people helped their peers use computers and cellphones, an effort that took on new significance during the pandemic, when Zoom and other communication technology became a critical lifeline. “I don’t know what our program would have looked like if we weren’t able to make that transition onto Zoom,” said Fink. 

Elkins has since gone through UJA’s incubator program to develop the initiative, which has expanded to four locations.

According to a summary report on “Time for Good”, which was recently released by the federation, so-called “strategic volunteerism” — employing strategies to recruit, train, manage and retain skilled volunteers — can magnify a nonprofit’s capabilities and its return on investment dramatically. 

In 2023 alone, an investment of $1.7 million was able to return the equivalent of $12 million in labor, according to the federation’s study.

“So many people have the ability to contribute in very meaningful ways, but they’re not leveraged,” said Alexandra Roth-Kahn, managing director of UJA-Federation’s Caring Department.

The report comes 10 years after the launch of “Time for Good,” the goal of which was to educate grantees on ways to use volunteer labor more thoughtfully. According to Roth-Kahn, nonprofits typically embed volunteerism into fundraising, using volunteering to develop interest in a cause. This is important, said Roth-Kahn, but there’s more that can be done. 

Commitment to screening, training and providing ongoing support and infrastructure for volunteers can significantly increase an organization’s reach, resiliency and crisis response, the report’s authors found. Specifically, providing written job descriptions for volunteer roles and role-specific training alongside staff professionals helps organizations bridge gaps between volunteers and the high level, specialized needs of the populations they serve, said Roth-Kahn. “It creates the right opportunities for the right people at the right time.” 

To provide bottom-up support for volunteers, in 2019 the federation worked with VQ Volunteer Strategies, a volunteering-focused consulting group, to create the yearlong “Volunteer Accelerators” incubator. As part of the program, organizations were required to take surveys before and after the year of Volunteer Accelerator programming, as well as in 2024, allowing the federation to observe if the program led to significant and sustained change in organizational practices.

“According to the 2024 survey, 100% of Time for Good participants report that volunteers increase the quality of programs provided, and 92% say that volunteers provide more detailed attention to people served,” the federation said.

The report’s authors also cited specific cases of volunteers having an outsized impact on the organization’s activities. The Jewish Community Council of Rockaway Peninsula in Queens, for instance, was able to keep its food pantry open 50% more hours each week because of its additional, better equipped volunteers.

Emily Ward from the New York Legal Assistance Group, another grant recipient, estimated the value of its “pro bono lawyers, law students and other volunteers… at over $53.5 million, which is more than NYLAG’s operating budget.”

UJA’s “strategic volunteerism” model also relies on, among other practices, placing volunteers in areas that align with their interests and professional skill sets. 

“You’re really honing into things that people are proud of. Things that they developed in their personal resume…They know accounting, they’re willing to serve as pro bono lawyers. They really want to open their Rolodex of professional contacts and engage people,” said Roth-Kahn.

But valuable professional skills aren’t always what you expect, said Elkins, who was a statistician, market researcher and cheese importer before he retired. His technical team includes not only former cybersecurity experts and engineers, but also poets, chefs and dentists. “I can teach a technician how to do something, but I can’t teach patience, observation and listening skills,” Elkins noted.

In addition to requiring more of the organizations, the strategic approach that UJA-Federation of New York is advocating is also more demanding for the volunteers.

“Volunteers are really signing up for a level of obligation and commitment that is beyond five hours on a Sunday,” said Roth-Kahn. “You have to find the right place in someone’s life, the right time for them and be very honest and upfront about what they’re signing up for.”

But Roth-Kahn has found that when organizations align recruiting and training with a volunteer’s skill set, volunteers are often willing to contribute significantly more time. Especially among baby boomers and millennials. “They’re hungry for the opportunity to give,” she said.

In Elkins’ experience, the critical period for recruiting volunteers is around retirement age, when they are still active and have the time to offer. “There’s a wealth bank out there,” he said.

As “Time for Good” concludes, Roth-Kahn hopes the educational programming and infrastructure developed by UJA for grantees will have a lasting impact. 

“Now, it’s almost a requirement to receive funding for organizations to be able to integrate this volunteer capacity into their application,” said Roth-Kahn. “That’s a big change for us and an evolution, and it will enable the work to be sustainable well into the future.“