Organizers of the Connect for Lebanon volunteer recruitment event, held Saturday, Jan. 17, at the Boulder Falls Event Center, reported it was an “overwhelming” success.
That was the analysis of Chris Breshears, the hotel’s manager and a member of the Lebanon Oregon Legacy Club, which organized the event.
“We had over 120 community members come in and learn ways to give back,” he said. “It was kind of organized chaos, people coming in and learning how to get involved in the community.”
The idea for the volunteer fair was the brainchild of Lebanon Oregon Legacy Club members. The Legacy Club is the new name for what was the Lebanon Optimist Club, which transitioned to an independent entity last October.
Breshears said club President Dale Hall and members Wyatt King and Adrienne Irwin, along with Sarah Brown, a reporter for The New Era, were major players in pulling the event together.
King said the idea for the fair was born when Legacy Club members got into a discussion about how to help people find opportunities to volunteer.
“We’ve all had people reach out to us, and say, ‘You guys are involved in all kinds of things, how do we do it?’,” King said, adding with a chuckle, “We always just showed up and nobody kicked us out.”
Still, he said, it was obvious that “there is a hunger for giving back but also a hesitancy, so we wanted to get rid of those obstacles as much as possible and provide some low-hanging fruit to help people get involved.
“We decided if we build it, they will come.”
Breshears said he wanted to help people “find ways to give back when it’s not from your wallet.”
“People think when they give to the community, to a nonprofit, they need to give money,” he said. “I wanted to help them find ways to just give time.”
Thirty-four nonprofit organizations participated in the inaugural event at the conference center.
Breshears and King said some participants came away with pages of names of people who were interested in volunteering.
He said the Lebanon Soup Kitchen reported being able to fill two vacant positions as well as get a list of other potential volunteers, and the Strawberry Festival and Dala’s Angels also reported recruiting successes.
Shyla Malloy, executive director for CASA (Court Appointed Special Advocates ) of Linn County, said the atmosphere at the volunteer fair was much different than most of the “tabling events” her organization is represented at.
Rather than attendees simply sweeping through and grabbing swag, “people actually wanted to volunteer, wanted to get involved,” she said.
“At all of these events, we spend hours, and we might have one or two really good conversations,” she said. “(At the Connect for Lebanon event) we had 53 interactions at my table, every single one of them intentional and meaningful. Based on return for investment, I would trade all of those for this.”
She said that, within a few days of the event, CASA had already heard from some of the contacts, who took the initiative to call.
“They didn’t even wait for us to call them back,” she added, noting that the advocacy work done by CASA volunteers, unlike many other volunteer opportunities, often requires a multi-year commitment.
Plus, Breshears said, more was happening during the fair than just people signing up to volunteer.
“We had nonprofits talking with other nonprofits, building connections to work together.”
Both he and King said that participating agencies appreciated the fact that attendees actually sat down and talked with their representatives rather than simply picking up brochures and moving on.
“We decided to keep it simple for the first few years,” King said. “Get all the nonprofits together in a big room, have some prizes, have some fun, help people figure out how to take the plunge and get involved.”
Now they’re thinking about how to do it better.
Breshears said he wants to expand the time frame for the event – this year’s was four hours – to include time for nonprofits to interact before the potential volunteers arrive.
King said they got feedback from participants who suggested having food “and we need to have bags.”
Also, he noted, more nonprofits want in, so they need to figure out how to fit everybody in.
Breshears said mid-January seems to work because “it’s right after the first of the year and people have new year’s resolutions to ‘give back, to help my community.’”
Albany holds a similar event, and he said they may try to coordinate the timing, possibly on successive dates, to make things more efficient for participating nonprofits.
Bottom line, he said, there will be more.
King said he thinks the volunteer fair will help continue connections that used to happen “organically,” but as the community exceeds 20,000 residents, “it’s getting too big to do that.”
“If we can build connections between families and friends and the causes they support, even as we grow beyond 20,000 people, we can continue that.”
“It seems like it’s working,” he said. “It’s just the first year and it was a big goal. It will take a few years to build culture change.”