Bringing community together
Volunteers can go online to look for opportunities to help Albuquerque organizations
Bringing volunteers together for the greater good of the community is the task of the Office of Civic Engagement.
The office, created just over a year ago under Mayor Tim Keller’s administration, provides support and helps coordinate volunteerism across Albuquerque.
“We put in a whole new volunteer engagement platform, which debuted in January, to be the main meeting point for volunteerism,” said David Chené, civic engagement manager, mayor’s office. “What we do is we have all of the city volunteer opportunities posted on the One ABQ volunteer site, cabq. gov/abq-volunteers. In addition, any community partner, any organization that leverages volunteers or wants to create a donation drive can use the site free of service.
“That’s kind of one innovative thing we’ve turned into a whole community approach, where anyone can use the site free of charge to recruit volunteers, track volunteers, log hours and manage documents so it’s a really cool and innovative tool that anyone can use.”
Currently there are more than 450 opportunities to volunteer with all city departments such as parks and recreation, animal welfare, the Albuquerque Police Department, as well as the public libraries, museums and partner organizations such as food banks. There are over 10,000 volunteers enrolled.
“They’re not always active but they’ve created accounts in our system,” Chené said. “We can send out our work with community partners and send out communications to all those people to let them know about new and different volunteer opportunities across the city. The idea is to connect people to opportunities that matches their interests and skills where they want to do it. So in their neighborhoods, or in the communities that they live in.”
City volunteers must sign a waiver and undergo a simple background check that can be done online. Once their background check clears they are free to volunteer with any of the programs listed on the One Albuquerque volunteer engagement platform, oneabqvolunteers.com.
On the site there is an entire page dedicated to COVID-19 responses. In March, all the traditional volunteer opportunities just kind of stalled due to all the social distancing needs, according to Chené.
“Generally the demographic for volunteers are older folks who really needed to pay attention to social distancing, so we created the COVID-19 response page with different ways that you could volunteer from home and also to list all the critical areas in the city that really needed support, like our emergency operation center needed volunteers and still does in the West Side homeless shelter,” he explained. “We needed people to screen folks coming in so we are able to work in direct partnership with the emergency center to coordinate volunteers for COVID-19 response.”
In addition, many community partners post on the COVID-19 response page.
“We helped recruit for a handful of the different mask making groups,” Chené said.
“They helped to make I think over 20,000 masks up to this point. And then the emergency operation center would help get the masks to places that need them most. They are amazing volunteers that are logging hours and all the hours that are logged for COVID-19 equates to over $25 an hour in reimbursable funds from the Federal Emergency Management Agency (FEMA) assistance grant. This money has played a real critical role in recovery at some point.”
The Office of Civic Engagement also partnered with the University of New Mexico through Corona Care New Mexico, which connects volunteers to frontline health workers to help with childcare, pet sitting, household tasks and other errands.
“Unfortunately, our numbers go up and once the fall hits, if it gets worse, we’re set up to help wherever we can and community members can find safe ways to help,” Chené said. “It’s really amazing to see all these initiatives pop up and it’s really been inspiring to play such a small role really as a connector to just help connect organization people and community members to one another especially during this difficult time.”
In addition to giving back to the community volunteerism is a pathway to employment, according to Chené. He began as a volunteer over 15 years ago and said most of his jobs have been a direct result of the network he built as a volunteer.
“There’s a lot of evidence that says now that active volunteers are 27% more likely to find full-time employment while volunteering,” he said. “And so our system is built so you can build a volunteerism résumé. You get to create your own profile and it really kind of looks like a résumé and you can add the information from that to your résumé. It helps you get your foot in the door at different city departments or different organizations around town to build networks to find a pathway to employment.”