Jan Sanders: Grassroots Game-changer

What started over lunch has now become 45 years of transforming the community through volunteerism.

VolunteerNow, originally grassroots operation SERV, was founded by Annette Strauss, Jan Sanders, Helen Boothman and Mitch Jericho to fulfill a community need for volunteer recruitment in Dallas.

“Annette invited me over for lunch one day – our families had been good friends for years – to discuss this project,” Sanders said. “She recruited me to help take it on, and we just started! This effort was 100% volunteer focused. We were self-funded, from the roof over our head, the phone bill and paper supply.”

Annette wanted to mimic a successful platform taking root in California – volunteer recruitment as a top priority through a series of people dedicated to finding and placing successful opportunities. Her tactic? An ad in the local paper.

“That program recruited their outreach through a newspaper column,” Sanders said. “Annette saw the potential in that. With her connections in the press and her pull, she secured their commitment to a regular column about volunteer needs, copying the model in California.”

The ad had a straightforward headline – “Want to volunteer?” – outlined by a thick, eye-catching black line and included a phone number to call. This is where Annette’s public relations prowess ended and Jan’s ingenuity began.

Sanders designed the basic structure of how VolunteerNow continues to operate today, with an emphasis on harnessing volunteer enthusiasm and interest and matching them with a directory of agencies. While VolunteerNow accomplishes this through VOLY.org, in the 1960s, this was all done through call logs, landlines and a printed directory. An interested volunteer would call the number provided, a SERV volunteer would answer and interview the caller, then work to match that potential volunteer with existing opportunities and agencies listed in a directory.

SERV (Special Effort to Recruit Volunteers) was the original, “grassroots” project that Sanders and company founded to fill in where other large agencies and councils needed support. The Community Council of Social Agencies operated as a support network for nonprofits, with a secondary focus on volunteer recruitment.

“They would try through persuasion to prevent duplication on an agency’s part,” Sanders said. “Basically this new effort would uniquely advocate for volunteers, not only recruit. I wanted to elevate the volunteer’s role in the agency from the very beginning, and instill in the agencies proper procedure.”

Sanders said she will never forget the anger of volunteers wanting to help and have agencies just use them to water their office plants. “That exemplifies some policies we were trying to instill,” she said.

Co-founders Helen and Mitch worked diligently in the community to garner name recognition, as Annette worked with the press and her political pull. Anita Martinez, Dallas’ first Latina city councilwoman and founder of Ballet Folklorico, served as the Vice President of the Dallas Voluntary Action Center from 1971 to 1973. 

As SERV’s presence grew, the community began to refer to this grassroots organization as the Dallas Voluntary Action Center, in line with names of similar centers popping up around the country. When a national movement under President Nixon to get more Americans to volunteer swept through Dallas, the original founders incorporated their group to be the Volunteer Center of Dallas. Later, this organization merged with the Volunteer Center of Tarrant County to become Volunteer Center of North Texas.

“There was this government effort to harness and recruit more volunteers, with a possibility of funding, legitimacy and structure,” Sanders said. “We saw the appropriateness and importance of bringing that effort to Dallas. It was coming from a national level with a local hook.”

Her top priority in recruitment was to get the volunteer to the agency as quickly as possible and not to let their enthusiasm slip away. This energy is at the heart of VOLY.org, VolunteerNow’s 24/7 portal with direct access to hundreds of nonprofits. Jan also saw the value in listening to the volunteer’s needs and wants in an opportunity – another feature at the center of VOLY.org’s operation.

While volunteer recruitment has evolved from voicemail logs and newspaper columns, Jan’s legacy and infrastructure – combined with her four co-founders’ visions – lives on 45 years later in the current operations of VolunteerNow.

“This idea of interviewing, tracking, placing an ad was about relationships with agencies,” Sanders said. “I was pleased to be part of the incorporating names, and I was honored by being part of that continuity. It was from the goodwill and recognition of a lot of people. It’s something I am very proud of.”