Yes. It's stable funding, depending on your organization's size and what's available to you.
I previously tuned into other sessions that you guys have had. One conversation that took place was about removing episodic funding and instead doing bigger or larger year-long or multi-year funding, which is very nice for individuals and organizations that have a foot in the door in those types of grants, but what my organization finds is that we spend many hours on these grants and what happens is that year after year they tend to go to the same programs—very well-established programs.
That is wonderful, because they are doing great work, but those episodic grants are what allow smaller organizations to get their foot in the door to show government and to show other grant programs that we are capable, that we are doing good work and that the money given to us does go to important work. Keeping those small episodic grants open, but also recognizing that in those episodic grants, there would be an amount of money that would be going toward operational costs and also costs for volunteers.... As mentioned by many people, what motivates volunteers to be involved? In the current economic situation, that tends to be funding to our young individuals.
We talked about the mandate for volunteer hours, which is great when it's put into a school system. Maybe they're getting off a class in order to do that volunteerism, so it's within their school curriculum, but if it's required outside of school hours and they have the option to work versus volunteering, many of those individuals would not give up the opportunity to take on a part-time job if they're able to get it. If there were some level of stipend or grant guaranteed.... I know that there are grant options available to young people who've completed a certain amount of volunteerism, but also, for a lot of those grants, someone has to recommend that young person.
For me personally, I oversee all of our volunteers. How am I supposed to pick which volunteer I should submit for one of these grants? How do I know that they're interested? How do I know that they're needed? Having some level of “tierism”—if you have this many hours of volunteerism, you're guaranteed this stipend or you're guaranteed this scholarship opportunity—I think those types of things financially really help us, because they mean that our volunteers can come and know they're getting something out of it. It's more than just the support we can give them; they're also getting some type of financial support as well.