Volunteerism and Personal Development
A Monthly Seminar For Integrating Volunteer Service Into Career And Personal Lives
The Center offers an ongoing seminar to help men and women discover and clarify the meaning and impact of their volunteer work upon their lives, both personally and professionally. It helps them learn how the volunteer experience affects their values, perspectives, and life goals; and how it can help them develop spiritually and emotionally.
The seminar is conducted on-site, at participants' organizations. Its overall goal is to support positive change and growth regarding one's values and overall life practices. Participants learn to use their volunteer activity to enhance self-examination, clarify value conflicts, and cultivate better integration and balance between career and personal life. Members participate in guided discussion, share experiences from their volunteer work, and discuss selected readings.
An additional purpose of the seminar is to teach participants how to use the volunteer experience to enhance work-related skills, and help address work-related conflicts. This goal is based on the recognition that all aspects of non-working life affect and are affected by one's experience of work. This includes such areas as leadership skills, creative expression, role relationships, and overall fulfillment in one's work. Seminar participants address conflicts that the volunteer experience may trigger regarding personal needs, values and goals on the one hand; and the needs of the job, career, and the organization, on the other.
The seminar may also help participants use the volunteer experience to enhance specific work-related skills, such as personal leadership, team building, creativity and innovation, collaborative problem-solving, resourcefulness, conceptual thinking, and clarification of organizational mission and values.
The seminar was designed to support new understanding about adult development. Particular life tasks and conflicts, unique to adulthood, underlie many of the crises of values and life direction men and women encounter during this time of life. Many people seek a greater sense of meaning and purpose, as well as more authentic connection and mutuality in relationships. They also seek more meaningful use of their creative powers and a sense of spiritual identity. They want to reduce the gaps that often accrue between personal values or ideals on the one hand, and actual practices on the other.
The challenge to cultivate meaning, purpose, connection, and a greater sense of integration between oneself and the world particularly affects career-oriented men and women, from about 35 onward. These issues link with newer thinking and recent research in human development, as well with holistic mind/body perspectives in medicine, and with new knowledge about the physical universe. All point to the same theme: the interconnectedness of all life. We are one. This interconnectedness has been long acknowledged by physicists and spiritual leaders alike.
Healthy human development requires applying and practicing this awareness. Volunteerism directly addresses this challenge because giving of ourselves is a form of expressing and acting upon our fundamental connection with all living things.
A study of survivors of the death camps during the Holocaust found that most of those who survived had engaged in active attempts to help others in the camps survive, not just themselves. Volunteerism, then, helps ourselves as well as the other because it is an affirmation of our connection. Volunteerism is really just a more organized form of something we do all the time, every day. We are always giving of ourselves in some way, in some relationship, all the time -- as parent, partner, or citizen. In that sense we are always "volunteering."
And whenever we volunteer we are helping redress the damaging affects of our culture of disconnection, which underlies much of the violence and indifference to life that pervades life today. Whatever we "practice" in daily life becomes stronger. All of our actions contribute in some way to shaping our own future and that of others. This is where we have choice over the kind of person we want to be. And this is where we can become full adults.
Because volunteerism involves giving of oneself in ways that are specifically not aimed at material reward or career advancement, it links with all of these aspects of adult development, and therefore can provide an opportunity for us to clarify and address them in new ways.
The Volunteer Seminar is a program of the Center for Adult Development, a nonprofit organization that promotes positive human development in careers and in personal lives. The Center's programs include research, organizational projects, educational seminars and workshops, as well as executive coaching and psychotherapy services to individuals.
The seminar is conducted by the Center's director, Dr. Douglas LaBier, with assistance from other Center staff. Dr. LaBier is a psychotherapist, organizational consultant, and writer whose work focuses on the link between careerism, value conflicts, and emotional development, as well as on issues of midlife growth and renewal within contemporary culture. The author of Modern Madness, he writes frequently on midlife and the career culture.
For further information about the Volunteer Seminar or other programs, contact the Center at (202) 363-8184, or E-mail the Center at centerinfo@adultdev.org.