Moving From Begging to Scouting A Case Study in Building Volunteer Culture Rabbi Elie Kaunfer Volunteer-led communities are often messy, complex enterprises. There is no car- rot of salary to motivate people, and they rely almost entirely on culture to ac- complish their goals. When there is a reigning culture of lethargy or incompetence, it is hard to move anything forward. But if there is a healthy culture in place, volunteering can bring communities to new heights. In this article I analyze some of the aspects of volunteering at Kehilat Hadar, an independent minyan I co-founded 10 years ago. Serving as a case study, Hadar offers larger lessons for building a successful volunteer culture. A SMALL CORE OF STRONG VOICES From the beginning, one of the salient features of Hadar has been its volunteer-led leadership. Often volunteer-led enterprises are known for their inclusion and democ- racy, but not necessarily for their effi ciency and productivity. Perhaps the most un- usual aspect of Hadar, and what made it different from other minyanim before it, is this ability to combine a volunteer ethos with a focus on “getting things done.” What were the structures that led to our culture of getting things done? Part of the success was simply the size of the leadership. Eschewing the model of a 30-person or even an 8- to 10-person board or leadership council, we kept the leadership very simple in the beginning: three to six people who had ultimate responsibility for the day-to-day operations. In such a small group, there was nowhere to hide from responsibility, and everyone’s voice was critical to the op- eration. Hadar was a top priority in our lives, and we were driven by a sense of shared mission and vision of what the community could be. The six of us were working in the secular world, but in those fi rst couple of years, our jobs were secondary to the work we put into the minyan. We would e-mail each other ev- ery day—day and night—to make decisions and address logistics, and we com- mitted to attending pretty much all the Hadar programming. On top of the daily e-mail traffi c, we had a weekly meeting. By that point in my life, I had been to hundreds of meetings in various contexts—Jewish and secular—and most of them were basically a game of counting down the painful minutes until they were over. Yet Hadar meetings were different. First, we broke some taboos—while most meetings are judged by how long they run (the shorter the better), with most averaging two hours, we decided to set the normal meet- ing time for three hours (7 p.m. to 10 p.m.). This extra hour paradoxically made the meeting run much more smoothly. Often, in a two-hour meeting, the entire goal is to run through the agenda items as quickly as possible, and when discus- sion is getting serious, the timekeeper is nervous because going through the Rabbi Elie Kaunfer is co-founder, Rosh Yeshiva, and Executive Director of Mechon Hadar and on the Talmud faculty at Yeshivat Hadar. He is the author of Empowered Judaism: What Independent Minyanim Can Teach Us About Building Vibrant Jewish Communities (Jewish Lights, 2010). 118 Journal of Jewish Communal Service, Volume 86, Nos. 1/2, Winter/Spring 2011 A CASE STUDY IN BUILDING VOLUNTEER CULTURE packed agenda won’t stand a chance unless “we move on.” But this tends to cut off debate artifi cially. With a three-hour limit, we were able to really delve into critical issues during the one time each week that we sat face to face. Evaluation and Evolution The gabbai (organizer) meetings were also an opportunity to evaluate ourselves and build on what we had created, sharpening our ideas of what Hadar was about and how the community should develop. Every week, we started with a brief review of the previous Shabbat’s service. This did not take long—maybe 5 or 10 minutes—but it gave us a forum to articulate what “good davening” looked like and the ways in which any particular week stacked up. We spent the most time evaluating our own actions as gabbaim. (Do we need to make announce- ments at the end of services? How can we make calling people up to the Torah move smoothly?) When one of us made a public goof, we would joke, “You’re fi red.” In truth, these conversations were done in a shared spirit of loving feed- back for each other. Keeping it Light Humor was a critical part of the gabbai culture. We took our commitment to Hadar very seriously, but at the same time, we never hesitated to make fun of ourselves (and the people in the gabbai group had a talent for self-deprecating humor). Being a volunteer organization afforded us the freedom to fail—we knew that if our venture did not work out, we could shut Hadar down without having to lay off any staff. This recognition of our minyan’s fragility allowed us some decent perspective on all the many discussions whose results we took so seriously, and we did not hesitate to mock ourselves for all our neuroses. Ulti- mately, humor allowed us to keep our meetings light, even when we were dealing with critical needs of the growing community. Policymaking and Accountability The longest discussions in those meetings were reserved for policy decisions, The meetings were which also helped us clarify the guiding principles of Hadar. How should we designed around a set a kashrut policy that respects the diversity of the community? How do we respond to someone who made numerous errors while leading davening, but culture of action and who wants to lead davening again? Should we co-sponsor an event that will accountability. take time away from our activities within Hadar? These were thorny issues, and we spoke about them for the bulk of the meetings. Two features characterized those discussions: First, everyone spoke and offered an opinion, and second, we were not politicking or grandstanding. We legitimately cared for the health of the community and its standards, and we looked at each problem from one key standpoint: How will it affect Hadar’s ability to maintain its formula of suc- cess? The meetings were designed around a culture of action and accountability. We agreed that if we made a decision in a meeting, we would carry it out, and we held each other accountable over e-mail in the following days. During the meet- ings, we often asked each other, “Are you writing this down?” (meaning, “Are you going to follow up on this decision in the week ahead?”). This gave people the hope and encouragement that the time they spent in meetings would actually lead to a result “on the ground.” Journal of Jewish Communal Service, Volume 86, Nos. 1/2, Winter/Spring 2011 119 A CASE STUDY IN BUILDING VOLUNTEER CULTURE VOLUNTEER ENGAGEMENT The real lifeblood of Hadar is its volunteers, and the community only functions with an engaged and energized volunteer crew. So the key question is this: How do you attract volunteers to a new enterprise and keep them motivated? Success Is Contagious How many times have you been to a minyan where this announcement is made: “Raise your hand if you can make the minyan next week. If we don’t get enough volunteers, we won’t be able to have minyan.” This is essentially the guilt-trip form of volunteer recruitment—the “world will fall down without you” mode of motivating volunteers. Although this makes each volunteer feel very important, it also sends the message that the entire volunteer enterprise hangs by a thread. At Hadar, we did not broadcast a sense of desperation, even when we might have been most tempted to in the early days. People were inspired by the con- stancy of the minyan and the ability of a small committed group of people to get things done. This then led them to ask how they could get more involved. Suc- cess inspired more volunteers. But even success is not enough to motivate everyone. Ultimately, most peo- ple need to be asked directly to contribute. This is why the leadership at Hadar actively sought out volunteers one person at a time. When you receive a group e-mail asking for help, you are often tempted to let someone else answer. How- ever, when someone comes up to you and asks you to do something personally, you feel important and valuable, and it is much harder to say no. At Hadar, we worked on scouting out who would be able to complete a task and then asked that person, one-on-one, to do that task. Making Volunteers Feel Appreciated The fl ipside of asking someone to volunteer is thanking those who come forward to do so. Yet in most organizations, the thanking of volunteers is done in a long roll-call list at the end of services or a program, when all people want to do is leave. With the Volunteers often ease of communication through e-mail, Hadar made sure to add another forum: a show their abilities personal thank-you via e-mail to each volunteer. This became a signature feature of in small, low-risk volunteering at Hadar (especially for service leaders)—within a few days of helping, tasks and, if success- people received an e-mail thanking them specifi cally for the work they had done. ful there, can be Because this acknowledment was done via e-mail, the thank-yous often led to a re- tapped for more turn thank-you from the volunteer (after all, gabbaim were volunteering as well) that important jobs.