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.