Professional Development Series

Title: "Everyone Welcome - A Toolkit for Broadening Volunteer Engagement" 

When segments of the community don’t feel welcome in volunteer spaces, they may choose not to engage.  The Equity in Action Toolkit, hosted on VolunteerMatch.com, includes over 20 free tools for leaders of volunteers who want to apply an equity lens to their practice. The goal of these tools is for more people to feel welcome in the call to volunteer and feel like they belong when they do volunteer. Attend this session to learn about tools like A Guide for Creating Inclusive Position Descriptions, Broadening Access to Volunteer Opportunities, and the Inclusive Volunteer Recruitment Guide. Learn about relationship-building tools like Encouraging Reflection in Volunteer Opportunities, Getting to Know Volunteers through Values Based Questions, and the Volunteer Motivation Questionnaire. Check out strategic tools like Guiding Questions for Equitable Community Collaboration and Ethical Data Collection.

About the Speaker: Faiza Vensant, CVA

From a young age, Faiza Venzant's parents instilled a strong sense of volunteerism in herself and her two older brothers. They, as immigrants to Canada from Uganda in the early 70s made a successful transition into Canadian life with the help of many generous volunteers. A volunteer herself from a very young age, she has been an advocate for volunteer engagement and excellence in volunteer management for 25 years.  As a facilitator for the Community Action Poverty Simulation, Faiza is passionate about equity and access amongst volunteers and leaders of volunteers. Faiza immigrated to the United States with her family in 2021.

Faiza immigrated to the United States in 2021 and now serves as the Executive Director with the Council for Certification in Volunteer Administration.  She is also a Principal Investigator with the Assessing Diversity and Equity in Volunteer Inclusion project which is funded by AmeriCorps.

In 2018, Faiza published her first children’s book entitled, My Mamma Wants to Eat Me Up!  As a mother of two young boys, she has not actually eaten any of her children.