Educational Volunteerism White Paper: Solving the Sustainability Challenges of Educational Volunteerism at Scale

To tackle the persistent challenge of not being able to sustain or successfully scale educational volunteer initiatives (such as volunteer facilitated reading clubs, math clubs, caregiver workshops, catch-up clubs, etc), Save the Children co-founded the Educational Volunteerism Community of Practice together with the mEducation Alliance. The working group of the Edu Vol CoP together with consultant Adrienne Barnes Story, in this white paper, describes several common challenges in sustaining educational volunteerism at scale and proposes using a layered model of volunteerism to mitigate these challenges.  Through collaborating with communities to simplify volunteer expectations and tasks according to local priorities and through partnering with already sustaining institutions/organizations with volunteer programs (Rotary Club, Peace Corps, Corps Africa, government-run national youth service programs, FBO run volunteer programs, etc.), education programs can provide more sustainable approaches at scale for community-based volunteers’ recruitment, capacity strengthening, incentivization and/or management.