In July 2010, I co-facilitated a session at the Victoria Foundation with Marg Rose, Director of Community Initiatives with the Foundation. The attendees were a mix of community advisors (professionals who volunteer their services to charitable organizations) and agencies/organizations who have received service from a Community Advisor, as well as some folks from other Victoria organizations which offer similar types of volunteer-based consulting to charities.

Our goal was to open up discussion about the expectations for/by community advisors when doing these volunteer engagements. Marg spoke briefly and eloquently about the conflict she feels when asking busy professionals to give up their time to help organizations, and her desire to serve both sides of the relationship ethically and fairly. We asked people to think ahead of the session about their expectations around time commitment, compensation, follow-on work with the agencies, and the depth of their involvement. During the session we grouped community advisors with representatives from beneficiary agencies to hear what would happen when each side shared their thoughts.

Marg kept the discussion flowing while I used graphic recording to capture some of the ideas coming from the group. The discussion didn’t head in exactly the expected direction, so my original graphic felt (to me) somewhat fragmented.

Realtime capture of discussion through graphic recording (click to see it bigger)

After taking this graphic back to my office, I decided I wanted to try to extract the key points and create a new graphic. There will be another session in August with another group of community advisors and agencies, and we want a starting point for that discussion. This new graphic will be posted in the room – how we will use it is yet to be determined, as we are waiting until next month to get together for our process design meeting.

The "More than Money" discussion, re-organized (Click to see it bigger)