Project Spotlight

In 2025, Points of Light announced Reimagining Service 2035, a national effort to double volunteering in the U.S. by 2035.

The first step of launching this initiative was creating a roadmap for how we’d achieve this bold goal: A National Volunteer Strategy. 

With my extensive background in volunteer and community engagement and lifelong study of social movements, I was eager to jump in when the Points of Light team connected for strategic support and thought leadership on the project. 

Immediately, it was obvious that this work was going to require more than a communications campaign or research. We’d need to create a thoughtful approach that included leadership across the sectors, feedback and input collection, and frameworks for acknowledging and working through the complexities of this goal. 

In a single Strategy document, we needed to clearly articulate how organizations and leaders could come together to make volunteering easier to access, more meaningful to experience, and better supported across the systems that make service possible.

It needed to be informed by input from volunteers, nonprofits, companies, faith communities, government leaders, researchers, volunteer engagement professionals, and other stakeholders across the country. It needed to name the tensions shaping volunteerism today, from balancing flexibility and meaningful engagement with organization capacity. And it needed to showcase the power of volunteering as the force for connection, trust, belonging, and community impact that it is.

As the lead consultant for developing the National Volunteer Strategy, I worked closely with the Points of Light team and cross-sector advisors to help shape both the overall process and the Strategy itself.

Early in the project, I helped develop the research approach and stakeholder engagement process. I created a clear plan for gathering, analyzing, and making sense of input from across the volunteer ecosystem — helping design the process for literature reviews, interviews, surveys, focus groups, Advisory Council and subject matter expert engagement, and strategy development.

I then led and supported key parts of that work, conducting literature and research reviews, interviewing leaders across multiple countries, supporting the design of surveys and focus groups, synthesizing input from more than 2,200 participants, and helping guide the work of a national Advisory Council consisting of about 40 amazingly smart and passionate experts and thought leaders across sectors.

There was a library’s worth of research, stakeholder feedback, and field insights, so sensemaking was critical here. We published a National Volunteer Strategy Progress Report in April 2026 to share our findings along the way — a “building in public” philosophy we agreed early on would be important early on.

Throughout the project, I helped lead the process to synthesize a large and complex body of research, feedback, and insights into a clear strategic framework. This included identifying major themes and challenges, analyzing qualitative and quantitative data, and ultimately co-designing the Strategy’s framework and 12 goals. Along the way, I also facilitated discussions and decision-making with stakeholders and presented findings at convenings and conferences. 

After months of data and feedback collection and synthesis, I helped shape and draft the final National Volunteer Strategy publication.

The National Volunteer Strategy was published on June 23, 2026, just before national celebrations honoring America’s 250th anniversary.

Read the Full National Volunteer Strategy

The result was a national, cross-sector roadmap including:

• A brief history of volunteer service in America and why a Strategy is needed now
• A Strategic Framework for recognizing the 3 core elements required to bolster volunteering by 2035: A Thriving Ecosystem, Transformative Impact, and Meaningful Engagement. 
• 12 Goal areas highlighting strategic opportunities to support volunteering — from Investment, to Access, to Technology, to Partnership. 
• A 3-Year Action Plan to kickstart the initiative
• Opportunities for organizations of all sizes across sectors to plug in, adopt elements of the Strategy, and collaborate.

Beyond the strategy itself, the initiative generated significant national visibility and momentum for the conversation about volunteering in America.

Media and Engagement

Media coverage, conference presentations, and sector-wide engagement helped elevate the findings and expand awareness of the challenges and opportunities facing volunteerism:

• Points of Light Taps Social Impact Strategist to Advance Volunteer Engagement
• Points of Light, founded by former President Bush, aims to double American volunteerism by 2035 (AP)
• America250 and Nonprofit Partners Mobilize Nationwide for National Volunteer Month (America250)
• Reimagining Service: How can nonprofits improve the volunteer experience? (Candid)
• Research highlights strategies for boosting volunteerism (Corporate Philanthropy Report, Wiley)
• Points of Light to unveil new strategy that it hopes will ignite a volunteerism boom (AP)
• Points of Light Launches a National Volunteer Strategy for the United States Ahead of 250ᵗʰ Anniversary of America (PR Newswire)

Ultimately, these efforts combined helped position the Strategy not simply as a publication, but as a catalyst for ongoing collaboration and action across the volunteer ecosystem.