Volunteering & Giving:

by William M. Sheets
Director for Advancement

4-H is celebrating its 100th birthday this year and by its very nature has been and will continue to be an organization that teams volunteers with professional staff members to deliver educational opportunities for America's youth. A significant aspect of 4-H achievement is the countless hours of volunteerism individuals have contributed as club leaders, representatives, judges, members of advisory councils, and boards of directors—and more. During the past 100 years, adult volunteers have helped shape the lives of young people across the country, from the most remote rural areas to the most urban.

In my 25 years of fund-raising and working with volunteer organizations, one of the most common answers given by volunteers when asked: Why do you volunteer? is this: "I received so much from my 4-H experiences as a young person; I want to pass it on." Pass it on is one of the philanthropic concepts of our culture. It is also one of the primary reasons people give their money as well as their time to organizations like 4-H.

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Volunteers & Fundraising
Organization requires leadership. The problems of leadership are important because the genius of American philanthropy—and of modern society generally—is organization.
In order to organize, one has to persuade others to come together in some common pursuit.

That is the function of leadership. In order to enable the people who come together in the organization to pursue their goals, money has to be raised. All that is true of private, for-profit activity, too, of course; the differences lie in what happens to the surplus of income over expenditures.

Volunteers like Lynwood Schrader and Jay Hellmann, past president and present chairman of the board of Friends of Kentucky 4-H respectively, provide important leadership in organizing the efforts to bring critical resources in pursuit of the mission of Kentucky 4-H. Volunteer-to-volunteer solicitation has and will always be the most effective fund-raising method available to an organization. Why? Because like politics, it's all local. People give to people, not faceless large or bureaucratic organizations.

So why do people give to an organization like 4-H? To pass it on. To pass it on to the youth in their community. To pass it on to the other volunteers. To pass it on for themselves, because they know that someone once passed it on to them.

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