Being Different & Making a Difference (Part 2)
In the first post in this series, I took a look at some of the successes the IHF model has achieved in its first five years. I’d like to turn now to an important question for any organization - new or old, large or small - namely, “what can we do better?”
When looking back at our first five years, two major areas of improvement jump out.
Working with an all volunteer staff presents some apparent challenges, most immediately for the IHF’s capacity. Our volunteers work incredibly hard, and the work they do is invariably of high quality. But there are limits to what a group of volunteers can accomplish – at least if they want to sleep at night! At various points over the past five years we have had to pass on opportunities to benefit our partners due to a lack of capacity. At certain points, some of our volunteers have had to make unfair sacrifices to meet our obligations to our partners. Over the past year, we have increasingly felt the pinch of how many hours our volunteers can work as we have grown. We have been lucky to increase the number of volunteers. And we have been very lucky to benefit from the leadership of our Executive Director Heidi Jutsum, who is able to dedicate an amazing amount of time to making sure all the IHF’s volunteers are working in the right direction. This oversight is particularly important to our student volunteers – both to their growth, and to ensuring that they make meaningful contributions to our partners. But the IHF is at a point where full time staff are needed to effectively manage our volunteers and fulfill our obligations to partners.
This leads to the next significant challenge facing the organization - unrestricted fundraising to support our capacity growth. We have traditionally spent less than 2% of revenue on administration and overhead. We have not focused on raising funds to cover administration or overhead in the past. As stated above, focusing donations on the needs of our partners is one of the IHF’s central tenets. We have thought very deeply about whether we want to commit ourselves to funding a staff position.
But a full time staff position would roughly double the hours spent on IHF management and administration. More importantly, it would give this person the freedom to focus entirely on meeting our partner’s goals and fostering our volunteers’ growth. It would both expand our capacity and improve the quality of our work. With a relatively small investment, the IHF could take on new partners, work with more students and better support all our stakeholders achieving their goals.
We exist for our partners. We believe an investment in a full time staff person is consistent with our mission and model. It will present challenges, but also opportunities – and it is essential to the ongoing success of the IHF and the work we do with our partners and volunteers.
I’ll be following up next week with the last post in this series. Keep an eye out…
RSS
