“This is what community is”
Last year, Rock Island’s Martin Luther King Center set an ambitious goal for its annual Thanksgiving celebration: serve 5,000 meals to community members.
For many years, the MLK Center had served about 200 meals the Sunday before the holiday. After adding Saturday delivery and, during COVID-19, a curbside pickup option, they watched that number tick up and up, from 1,000 meals in 2018 to 2,200 in 2020 and 3,500 in 2021.
In 2022, at the end of the whirlwind weekend, they sat down to tally up the numbers and see whether they had reached their goal. “We blew it out of the water,” said Rebecca Arnold, the MLK Center’s resource development manager. They had far exceeded their hopes—to the tune of 7,130 meals.
With a full-time staff of just 15, how did they do it? Volunteers. “They’re willing to do whatever it takes,” Arnold said. “They come down with open hearts and generous spirits, and they go home smelling like turkeys and beans. But they have a lot of fun—and they want to come back.”
When she joined the MLK Center in 2018, Arnold was the organization’s first professional fundraiser in its then 43 years. At the time, she and her new team’s leadership recognized that while the nonprofit had a number of long-time, steadfast volunteers, there was an untapped opportunity to bring in more community members for a wider range of activities.
They turned to the Quad Cities Community Foundation for a Nonprofit Capacity Building Grant to help strengthen their ability to reach more volunteers and provide them an experience worth writing home about. With the grant they received, they hired a consultant for an outside expert perspective on their existing efforts and ideas on how they could level up in areas like volunteer recruitment, orientation, and follow-up.
“Engaging volunteers to achieve such overwhelmingly positive results doesn’t happen by accident,” said Kelly Thompson, vice president of grantmaking and community initiatives at the Community Foundation. “We were pleased to support the MLK Center’s thoughtful, strategic approach to working with volunteers—and to see what they’ve been able to achieve.” Nonprofit Capacity Building Grants are made possible by the generosity of donors who give to the Community Foundation’s Quad Cities Community Impact Fund.
“We live in a truly generous community. So nonprofits, remember that people want to give and volunteer, they want to help and be involved. Seeing it not as a transaction but as a relationship-building opportunity is the most important thing.”
For Arnold, one of the most important outcomes of the process has been seeing what she calls a “culture of philanthropy” grow within her organization. “Engaging volunteers is now something that our entire staff embraces in their different programs and roles,” she said. “When volunteers come, everyone knows that making it a wonderful experience is a top priority. It’s become a core value of what we do, and it wouldn’t have happened if we hadn’t expressly focused on building our capacity.”
To other nonprofits that would like to harness the generosity of community members who give their time, Arnold’s advice is simple. First, decide it’s a priority. Then allocate resources to it. “This is not the kind of thing you can squeeze in along with everything else,” she said. “It needs to be part of at least one person’s job description, and everyone needs to understand why it’s important for the organization’s relationships with the community.”
Ultimately, rich, long-term relationships are what volunteering is all about, whether those are with corporate partners who can help mobilize large groups of generous employees or individuals and families who may support a beloved cause in different ways across generations.
As someone who grew up in a family where community service was a closely held value, Arnold feels kinship with Quad Citizens who volunteer with the MLK Center and other local nonprofits. “To me, this is what community is,” she said. “This idea that we belong to each other and take care of each other. Getting involved with community organizations is a great way to do that.”
It's also a wonderful way to know your community better, she added—especially your neighbors who may live in different circumstances from you. “The more we can understand about the reality of our entire community and not just the bubble we live in, the we can all be,” she said. “Volunteering keeps us connected to the full breadth of the humanity that we live in.”
At the Thanksgiving celebration last year, Arnold found herself pausing to appreciate the sheer range of volunteers who came together to make the event a reality. “You get a wide spectrum of people rolling up their sleeves and working side by side for a wonderful purpose,” she said. “It’s a beautiful, beautiful thing to see.”
Learn more about applying for a Nonprofit Capacity Building Grant here.
