Future of Professional Development in Volunteer Management

Am pleased to be working with Sue Jones from Volunteer Warrington in England on a webinar on this very topic. The webinar will be LIVE from the European Year of Volunteering road show in London on Thursday November 3rd and will include:

• Rob Jackson, of Rob Jackson Consulting
• myself
• Carl Cadman, Volunteers Manager at Acorns Childrens Hospice 
• Laura Hamilton, Volunteer and Development Manager at George House Trust
• a live audience
• a web audience

Will one day these things seem normal to be doing a seminar in this way?

We will focus on:
- Why professional development is so important for managers of volunteers
- The range of options available
- What's missing and what's next for the profession

Timing: 3rd November at 15:00 to 16:30 GMT

Auckland, NZ 4:00am Fri, Nov 4 2011
SYDNEY, Australia: 2:00am Fri, Nov 4 2011
TOKYO, Japan 12:00 midnight Fri, Nov 4 2011
NEW YORK, United States, New York 11:00a Thu, Nov 3 2011
PORTLAND, United States, Oregon 8:00a Thu, Nov 3 2011


To register:
Live: http://www.eventbrite.com/event/2338945850
Webinar: https://www3.gotomeeting.com/register/698406286

Tuesday Technology: My Travel Blog

I am really pleased to announce that I have been asked by Boarding area.com to join their stable of blogs. Boarding area believe they have the "best" travel blogs available online. In asking me, they told me they liked my content and my reader numbers. Very affirming.

My travel blog: Wild about Travel can now be found at: http://boardingarea.com/blogs/wildabouttravel/

I am feeling very chuffed! It says I do know something about Social Media. :) I started Wild about Travel as a hobby. It has grown from that with over a 100 people reading it every day!

Come and join me!

Monday Motivation: DON'T Spend 1st hour of Day Checking email

Julie Morgenstern (dubbed the "queen of putting people's lives in order" by USA Today, is a professional organizer and productivity expert). She suggests spending the first hour of your workday email-free. Instead, find one task (even a small one)  and tackle that first thing. Her argument is the first hour of the day needs to be focussed on tasks.
Lifehacker is trying this. I am working up to it!


Food for thought

Sad times

Feeling quite sad about my sister today. Her health, after an amazing run, took a turn down this week. Thanks everyone for your kind words and support.

World Changers: handwashing Day 15th October

UNICEF (United Nations Fund for Children’s Activities) declared 15th October Global Handwashing Day.

The purpose of Global Handwashing day is to raise awareness & promoting hand washing to school children and their parents. This might sound like an odd issue but every twenty seconds a child dies from a disease that could have been prevented.

On 15th October, teachers, NFPs, government officials, ambassadors and members of private sector people will raise awareness of hand washing with soap as a  powerful health intervention

There are some Fundamental facts:

1. Washing hands only with water is not enough!
2. Hand washing with soap can prevent children dying from diseases across the developing world
3. The important time for hand washing with soap is after usage of the toilet and before having food.
4. Hand washing with soap is the single and most productive health interventions-  Hand washing decreases the risk of not only diarrhea but also some severe symptoms such as cholera and dysentery by 48 to 59 %.

What can you do?

Tell People its World Handwashing Day 

Post on your Facebook, tweet etc

WASH YOUR HANDS

Teach your kids to wash their hands

I am amazed when I go into a public lavatory, how many people dont wash their hands? Or is it just a male thing?

EEk..they want to know where I am going?

Its bad enoigh everyone seems to know where I am thanks to Facebook, twitter and foursquare updates. Now a tool wants to tell the world where I am going to be.

Forecast is that tool. Downloadable to your phone its in test mode. The idea is that you will tell friends where you are going and organise serendipitous get togethers. Four square and Facebook help your friends know where you are or where you have been. Useful for keeping tabs in your friends. But it doesn't tell friends where you are going to be. Forecast tells people where and when I am going to be somewhere.

The first step is you search for where you are going to be.
You then enter when you are going to be there
When the time comes, Forecast asks if you are there. You can then check in and it adds the check in to your FourSquare.

I have been testing it for a few weeks. As you can tell, its not grabbed me, as a user, for three reasons:

1.  I am not sure I really want people to know where I am
2. Its one more app. I would rather it was integrated into Foursquare so i could do it there.
3. not many people I know are on it

As a user, I think I would use it occasionally.

As an agency, how can we use it? Create a location for your agency on Foursquare and/or Facebook. Encourage your volunteers who use Foursquare to "check in" to that location so that people can see you exist. If volunteers use Forecast, encourage them to broadcast to the world where they are going to be.

I will be blogging about Foursquare sooon.

Monday Motivation: Live life

"Your time is limited, so don't waste it living someone else's life"-Steve Jobs, 2005

http://bit.ly/nvyUXW

Wednesday World Changers: Oscar Romero

A desire to care for humanity drives so many people. Some come from a religious background such as Óscar Romero. His life is an example for so many. Romero  was the fourth Archbishop of San Salvador in El Salvador from 23 February 1977 until his assassination on 24 March 1980. Three years.


The funeral mass held on 30 March 1980, in the San Salvador Cathedral was attended by over a quarter of a million mourners - has to be one of the biggest funerals in history. The funeral was never finished interrupted by smoke bombs and gunshots which killed between 30 and 50 people. 

1980 saw the start of the civil war in El Salvador, a tiny country in Central America. This war which lasted until 1992 saw the deaths of between  8 000 and 16 000 civilians  every year of the war. In 1981, an entire village  (El Mozote) was massacred. Rape,murder, bombings, intimidation of the clergy, teachers, lecturers, church lay workers, political activists, journalists, labor unionists (leaders, rank-and-file), medical workers, students, human-rights monitors and politicians. It was a nasty, nasty war.
  

In 1990 I saw a film about Romero which impacted me profoundly. Touched by the magnitude of what was happening in El Salvador I went there in 1991 (twenty years ago). I was in El Salvador when the peace agreement was signed in Mexico in 1992 and danced in the streets with thousands of people ending the horrific conflict. That country changed my life. 


Romero too was changed by what he saw. Installed as a "safe, conservative" archbishop, Romero’s first task as archbishop was to bury dozens of people machine-gunned by the army for protesting against doctored election results.


He soon spoke out regularly against the poverty and injustice of his country: We must not seek the child Jesus in the pretty figures of our Christmas cribs. We must seek him among the undernourished children who have gone to bed at night with nothing to eat, among the poor newsboys who will sleep covered with newspapers in doorways. (December 1979)  


In his last sunday sermon he said: "In the name of God, in the name of this suffering people whose cry rises to heaven more loudly each day, I implore you, I beg you, I order you: stop the repression" (March 23, 1980,


Romero was chosen in 2008 as one of the 15 Champions of World Democracy by the Europe-based magazine. 



On 24 March 2010—the thirtieth anniversary of Romero's death—Salvadoran president Mauricio Funes offered an official apology on behalf of El Salvador for Romero's death.


In December 2010, the United Nations made 24 March:  International Day for the Right to the Truth concerning Gross Human Rights Violations and for the Dignity of Victims.


Why am I blogging about this today? In recent weeks, the mystery of who shot Romero has finally been revealed: Samayor Marino Acosta, Deputy Sergeant from the former National Guard. This ends one chapter in the story of Romero but not the book. After all, 30 years after he died, people ate stil quoting from his sermons -in the world and nopt just in then church. of how many other priests can we say this si true?


Romero said: I must tell you, as a Christian, I do not believe in death without resurrection. If I am killed, I shall arise in the Salvadoran people.’

Tuesday Tech: Can you switch off for a week?

Could you survive a week without screen-based technology?  Monday 3rd October, 2011 at 5pm, a group of year 11 students from Brentwood Secondary College in Melbourne, Australia are shutting down all their screen-based electronic devices until Friday evening to embrace Real Life.

They are doing it in response to the film Play Again, which follows six American teenagers who, like the “average American child,” spend five to fifteen hours a day behind screens. In Play Again, the kids leave their gadgets and move into a wilderness adventure with no electricity, no phone coverage, and bugs! 

This may not seem unusual to anyone over 24 but for anyone under that age their entire world has beeped, calculated, computed and buzzed for all of their conscious lives. Not being connected 24/7 could therefore be a shock!

The film "Play Again",  investigates the consequences of a childhood removed from nature and considers what we need to do in the future.

I m fascinated to see what the Bretwood experiment will be like...shame they are not blogging it! LOL

What about you? How long can you last for?

Monday Motivation: Staying the Course

However beautiful the strategy, you should occasionally look at the results - Sir Winston Churchill

from a radio speech delivered before the outbreak of World War II