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Providing national leadership and coordination for federally sponsored volunteer programs |
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Impact
Our work significantly advances the interests of the American people as volunteers which appreciably enhances our agencies' missions to protect, enhance, and develop our nation's precious natural and cultural resources.
Expertise
Our technical expertise, management ability, and practical experience are critical to our role as our agencies? volunteer program leaders; our skills help others who administer local unit programs and our volunteers do their jobs
more effectively.
Discipline
We faithfully accept the professional ethics statement of the Association for Volunteer Administration (AVA). Diversity We strive for a merit-based volunteer laborforce that is excellent, reflective of the American people, and confident that solid, volunteer-related performance
is rewarded.
Partnership
Our effectiveness as an interagency team is heightened by the unique mix of skills and experiences that our varied backgrounds and agency missions give us.
Commitment
We are dedicated to FITV's vision and mission statements and to the effective implementation of the strategic plan; we take the long-term view that comes with a career, not merely a job.
Volunteerism has a long tradition in theUnited States. Alexis de Tocqueville, after visiting and making observations about American society between 1831 -32, recorded the following:
Americans of all ages, all conditions, and all dispositions, constantly form associations. They have not only commercial and manufacturing companies in which all take part, but associations of a thousand other kinds -- religious, moral, serious, futile, extensive or restricted, enormous or diminutive. The Americans make associations to give entertainment, to found establishments for education, to build inns, to construct churches, to diffuse boo&, to send missionaries to the antipodes; and in this manner they found hospitals, prisons, and schools. If it be proposed to advance some truth or to foster some feeling by the encouragement of a great example, they form asocie ty... and I have often admired the extreme skill with which the inhabitants of the United States succeed in proposing a common object to the exertions of a great many men, and in getting them voluntarily to pursue it.
Volunteer service has been a part of virtually every civic function of our society, including libraries, firehouses, poorhouses, museums, hospitals, and natural resource activities since the founding of the nation. Defined in the broadest terms as the contribution that individuals make as nonprofit, non-wage, and non-career action for the well being of their neighbor, community, or society at large. It takes many forms, from traditional customs of mutual self-help to communities responding to times of crisis with relief efforts, to conserving, maintaining, and enhancing a nation's natural and cultural resources.