What is Skills Based Volunteering?

Today Skills-Based Volunteering (SBV) is the new way of doing volunteering. Five years from now SBV and Pro Bono volunteering services will be so natural that the expression will not need to be defined anymore. Using personal talents or professional competences will be a usual way for volunteers to help nonprofit organizations in their internal organization – pro bono, business-oriented consulting services for free – or in the delivery of their services while developing new talents or leadership skills.

From a baby boomer delivering free logistic consulting services to a food bank organization to the millennial teaching how to use multimedia for a better awareness of a fund raising event or to an architect helping re designing library in schools, skills-based volunteering is a strategic type of volunteerism that exponentially expands the impact of nonprofits by incorporating a whole range of skills that strengthen the operations and services of nonprofit organizations.

Connecting the volunteer with the right skills to the right project at the right time will allow getting a greater impact and building stronger relationships between volunteers and the nonprofit sector. Therefore it means increasing the volunteer interest to do on-going projects for the already known organization. And why not imagine that a corporation can ‘adopt’ a nonprofit entity to help it in the long run, as the Volunteer Center of Cedar Valley, is proposing today to local businesses.


To learn more about Skills Based Volunteering contact the Volunteer Center of Cedar Valley at (319) 272-2087, email, or visit www.vccv.org.