What Is a Volunteer Coordinator and How to Become One

Volunteer coordinators typically work for nonprofit organizations. As a volunteer coordinator, your primary responsibilities are the recruitment and management of volunteers and the arrangement of volunteer events and programs. Your job duties include training new volunteers, assigning them to particular jobs, tracking their volunteer hours, providing support, and evaluating volunteers. If you work at a small organization, your duties likely go beyond management of volunteers and include tasks like grant writing, marketing, bookkeeping, and organizing information. Your work as a volunteer coordinator helps further the mission of the organization where you work.

You need a bachelor’s degree for most volunteer coordinator jobs. However, your degree field can vary as long as it’s relevant to the mission of the nonprofit organization where you want to work. Some bachelor’s degree programs to consider are nonprofit administration and human resources management. If you want to focus on a particular cause, such as drug addiction or mental health, it may be good to have a degree in psychology. Your previous work experience helps when pursuing a career as a volunteer coordinator. Jobs in which you train other employees or manage groups of people are useful to have on your resume and may give you additional qualifications for certain roles.

To be a good volunteer coordinator, you must be passionate about making a difference for a cause. You need strong interpersonal skills, as much of your job requires interacting with volunteers and employees of the nonprofit organization. Since recruitment and selection of new volunteers is one of your responsibilities, you need solid interviewing skills. You need excellent leadership skills to train and team-build with new volunteers. Event planning and marketing volunteer efforts rely on your organizational and project management abilities. You can find volunteer coordinator jobs in many sectors, like social services, animal welfare, political advocacy, and in environmental organizations.