UMHS+VolunteerMatch = Enhanced Volunteer Services

Volunteer Services partners with national database to make volunteering easier than ever

Volunteering just got a whole lot easier with a new partnership between Volunteer Services and VolunteerMatch, a national online volunteer database.

The partnership is the brainchild of Jennifer Gegenheimer-Holmes, director of Operations in the Emergency Department, and her Leadership Development Program team as part of a recent project.

“We drew on my experience post-Katrina,” Gegenheimer-Holmes says. “At that time, there really wasn’t a good way to organize volunteer response or connect with others who wanted to help. I wanted to develop a Web site as a central clearinghouse for internal and external volunteer opportunities and our team needed to come up with a project for our leadership program. It was a perfect fit.”

The team—which includes Musty Habhab, administrative manager, Internal Medicine; Marilyn Hollier, director, Hospital Security and Entrance Services; Marie Lozon, M.D., associate professor of pediatrics and emergency medicine; Ellen McKeown, risk management consultant; and Brian Zink, M.D., associate dean for Medical Student Career Development—chose VolunteerMatch because it allows UMHHC to be strategic with its community engagement programs, provides seamless, integrated and user-friendly volunteer management, and provides reporting capabilities that reduce administrative burden associated with robust volunteer programs.

To implement the new site, UMHS Public Relations and Marketing Communications agreed to fund the project and develop the Web site to house the new program.

By visiting www.med.umich.edu/volunteer, employees can search for volunteer opportunities by ZIP code and area of interest, and find local, state and national postings. Whatever your interest, talent and availability, the new site offers thousands of opportunities to make a difference in your community.

Volunteer Services hopes this new site will increase the number of individuals interested in Health System volunteer opportunities, create an easy way for staff to get involved in the community and provide a platform for those interested in disaster response. For U-M specifically, the site will be used to create a database of community members and University staff who can respond in case of pandemic influenza. “We learned from Katrina that our community is much bigger than southeast Michigan,” says Alfreda Rooks Jordan, Community Health Services. “This is a way for us to reach a larger community—to bring more volunteers in and help our staff volunteer externally.”