Inspiration from the Speeches of Marlene Wilson

There is a lot of discussion in the volunteer management world about the reasons why people chose to volunteer. Trying to pinpoint these reasons can be difficult. After all, there are as many reasons as there are volunteers! But for all the thought that goes into looking at the volunteers’ motivations, it can be easy to overlook an equally crucial factor: volunteers’ inspirations. These inspirations come in many forms; a book one has read, or an event in history, but more often than not they come in the form of a person. A volunteer manager’s job is not simply to coordinate and administrate, it is to inspire those that do our work. Marlene Wilson reminds us of that through the speeches collected in her book, Visionary Leadership in Volunteer Programs.

Visionary Leadership is a collection of speeches from Marlene’s over thirty years of writing, consulting, and presenting. Since the publication of her seminal 1976 work, The Effective Management of Volunteer Programs, which was the first attempt to outline what volunteer management, was all about, many people have become managers in the volunteer world. These speeches are a call for those managers to become leaders. As Marlene puts it, “I realized that there was . . . a totally new book – and one that moves from a focus on ‘management’ to an advocacy for leadership.”

Throughout the sixteen speeches collected in Visionary Leadership, Marlene provides the reader not just with facts and plans, but also anecdotes and allegories to contextualize this information, AND a new vocabulary of leadership for which to put these ideas into action. Mixed with statistics about volunteer involvement are stories about a village under a dome or a raccoon in your living room, which lead into discussions about core values, and ultimately into a call for a formulation of group vision. Thinking creatively to reach this vision is what this book is really about. In her chapter “Leading with Soul and Vision,” Marlene writes:

What Do We Mean by Leadership?

For the past 30 years, I’ve been reading, writing, and pondering about the topic of leadership. The definition that captures the essence of what I want to suggest for leaders of volunteer programs comes from one of our own colleagues in this program, Mike Murray: “A leader is someone who dreams dreams and has visions and can communicate those to others in such a way that they, of their own free, will say yes!”

Let’s examine the critical components of his definition for a moment. Having dreams and visions is not about where we are but where we want to be. That sounds so easy, logical and even fun, so why don’t we do more of it in the field of volunteer administration? I would suggest it is because we are too busy doing, surviving, and coping. Who has time to dream except at 2:00 a.m.? Therefore, one of our biggest challenges is to shift our basic paradigm about how we do leadership (not how we talk about it). As you begin your journey as a volunteer manager, make dreaming a priority, not an afterthought!

If you’re looking for a book that will help you move from simply managing your group’s volunteers into truly inspiring them, look no further!

You can purchase Visionary Leadership in Volunteer Programs directly from the Energize Bookstore.