Mobilizing Skilled Volunteers: How Leveraging Identities and Institutions Helped in Motivating Researchers to Engage with Policy

• In Event: 1423 - Practice Symposium- Lightning Round on Career Paths, Transitions, and Opportunities for Sociologists Beyond Academia

Abstract

PRACTICE-SETTING
This presentation focuses on the practice-setting of a postdoctoral fellowship with the Scholars Strategy Network (SSN) in Atlanta. The SSN is a 501c3 dedicating to helping researchers get their work into public policy debates. As an SSN postdoctoral fellow, I spent half my time researching, as in a typical postdoctoral fellowship. I spent the other half my time organizing for the SSN. Specifically, I built connections between researcher-volunteers and policymakers, community groups, and journalists across Georgia.

PROBLEM
This presentation will focus on the problem of mobilizing researcher-volunteers despite important obstacles, some unique to this practice-setting and some shared across contexts where skilled volunteers are involved. Skilled volunteer work is special in that volunteers must not only carve out time for their volunteer activities, they must also rigorously apply themselves and their highly developed abilities. In the policy context, as in many other contexts, the stakes can be high. Failure is a distinct possibility and may decrease the likelihood of future mobilization. Also, engagement often does not align with traditional institutional incentives (though it often aligns with non-traditional incentives). Indeed, policy engagement can even be viewed as a liability by volunteers’ home institutions (but not necessarily).

APPROACH
The challenge is to efficiently and effectively build on the desire that skilled volunteer-researchers have to make a service contribution. The approach discussed in this presentation is to identify and develop ways to leverage identity and build on (or even create) non-traditional institutional incentives.

USEFULNESS
This presentation will be useful primarily to those who work with skilled volunteers, but it will also apply to a wide range of practitioners interested in motivating colleagues and navigating challenging institutional incentive structures. Participants will leave with an expanded toolkit for engaging skilled volunteers, developed from real-life experiences with the SSN in Georgia.

Author

• Daniel Lanford, Georgia State Unviersity and Emory University