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• Lunchtime Social Hour

  • When
    March 24, 2021
  •  
    12:00 PM - 1:00 PM (PDT)
  • Location
    Offered remotely via Zoom

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  Connect with fellow volunteer program professionals for a lunchtime social hour. Let’s come together to share ideas and resources that may help each other through these changing and challenging times.

  Remote zoom link access will be provided in your event reminder email. 

  
  

  
  

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• Workshop: Creative Expression for Compassion Fatigue

  • When
    March 30, 2021
  •  
    9:00 AM - 12:00 PM (PDT)
  • Location
    Offered remotely via Zoom

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  Volunteer management has always had its own challenges, not to mention balancing your burnout while keeping volunteers engaged and active. You’ve been required to be a leader, a wrangler, a coach, and a project manager (to name a few roles). But now you have to translate all those hard-earned skills to a whole new context. The field of volunteer management is changing, along with every other field, and the burden of navigating this new territory while supporting your volunteers through their process can feel like too much for our hearts and minds to bear.

  What can we do about it?

  In this workshop we’ll engage with our experiences of compassion fatigue and burnout through creative expression, reflection, and discussion. We’ll explore themes of despair, isolation, and self-doubt as well as those of healing, hope, and honesty. We’ll reconnect with what brought us to this profession, and in doing so find ways to inspire and foster hope in the volunteers we care for. 

  Suggested supplies to have on hand: markers, pencils, pens, papers, cardboard, tissue paper, paint, anything that you might find around your home to enhance your art experience. 

  Suggestions for your setting: it is expected that participants will have a private space and/or headphones to respect everyone’s process and confidentiality. 

  The art process can elicit a range of emotions and participants are encouraged to track with themselves around their needs and limits.

  Workshop leader, Whitney Hall, uses humor and art as a healing force for addressing burnout and compassion fatigue. Through collective experiences and assisted self-expression she finds playful ways to shed light on uncomfortable issues while exploring what role culture and systems play in causing this mess. Whitney Hall is a licensed art therapist and licensed professional therapist in the Portland area and has spoken nationally and internationally on her observations of burnout, compassion fatigue, grief, and loss.

  
  

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• Volunteer Management 201 (Remote Training)

  • When
    April 12, 2021
  •  
    8:15 AM - 12:00 PM (PDT)
  • Location
    Offered remotely via Zoom
  • Spaces left
    11

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  Take the next step into the amazing field of volunteer management and join us for Volunteer Management 201!

  This training prepares volunteer managers to tackle the challenging and complex issues of volunteer engagement and program sustainability, to help you build the skills you will need to lead the volunteers of 2021 and beyond.

  This interactive training is designed for volunteer managers who have completed Volunteer Management 101 or those who are seeking advanced training in the field. Facilitated by Lupine DeSnyder and Melia Tichenor, both of whom have been working in the field of nonprofit and volunteer management for over a decade.

  Typically a full-day offering, this training has been modified for our remote reality and will take place via Zoom in two 3.75 hour morning sessions, offering a mix of content presentation, activities, and small group discussions in breakout rooms. The training will covering the following topics and address COVID-19 considerations along the way:

  Day 1: Monday, April 12, 8:15am - 12:00pm
  

  • Organizational Culture & Volunteers
  • Intercultural Communication
  • Equipping Staff to Engage Volunteers
  • Cultivating Leadership Volunteers

  Day 2: Tuesday, April 13, 8:15am - 12:00pm
  

  • Motivational Leadership
  • Advocating for your Volunteer Program
  • Program Evaluation Strategies
  • Breakout Group topics

  Registration for this event will sign you up for both sessions. Zoom links to join this training remotely will be sent in the week before the event to those who have registered, along with a workbook to be used throughout the training. Questions? Contact melia.novaa@gmail.com

  Join us and develop your volunteer program to its fullest potential!
  

  

  About your Trainers:

  Melia Hadidian Tichenor, CVA is in her eleventh year of working in the volunteer management world in Portland, specializing in bringing learning experiences into the service environment. She currently serves as the Coordinator for the Student Community Engagement Center at Portland State University, helping empower students to engage with communities to create positive social change, in addition to training colleagues in volunteer management best practices with NOVAA. 
  

  Melia completed her Masters degree in Postsecondary Adult and Continuing Education (PACE) and a Service-Learning Graduate Certificate through PSU’s Graduate School of Education and has been a Certified Volunteer Administrator (CVA) since 2014. Prior to coming to Portland State, Melia spent eight years at Hands On Greater Portland, working to support hundreds of Hands On's nonprofit partners in developing a wide array of episodic volunteer projects, both for the Hands On Project Calendar and for various national days of service. In addition to her work with Hands On's nonprofit partners, she ran the Hands On Greater Portland TeamWorks program, which brought together teams of 10-12 volunteers to explore specific issue area or neighborhood through the lens of service learning and experiential education.

  Melia has also taken her volunteer management experience abroad to Armenia, where she served for four months as a volunteer consultant and trainer to the staff at Birthright Armenia, a program designed to connect young diasporan Armenians to their cultural and ancestral roots through volunteer positions and internships in the Armenian homeland. 

  Lupine DeSnyder is a Certified Volunteer Administrator (CVA) with over 20 years of experience in volunteer program management and community engagement in private, non-profit and government settings with organizations ranging from private businesses to public and non-profit organizations, such as the City of Portland and The Nature Conservancy. She also co-founded, managed and grew the affordable health care-based business, Working Class Acupuncture. Most recently, Lupine served as Community Access Coordinator in Volunteer Services with Metro Parks and Nature, and as Partnership Manager with the statewide environmental nonprofit, SOLVE, in Portland, Oregon.

  Lupine has trained and served as a neighborhood mediator with PCC/East Metro Mediation. She facilitates the East Portland Youth Advocates group, which strives to creatively connect and inform youth service providers in East Portland. She also serves on the board for Morpheus Youth Project, a non-profit that builds healthy communities for young people thru arts and culturally responsive activities both in and outside of correctional institutions. She has a B.A. in Political Science from University of Utah with a stint at University of Oregon tucked in there as well.

  In her distant past, Lupine was a State Parks Seasonal Park Ranger in Southern Utah and blames this for her passion around connecting people with natural areas by promoting equity in access and volunteerism. She is excited to share and learn from workshop participants.

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