Turning A Story Into A Mission

By Teddy Hennes, VIP Fellow at Big Brother Big Sisters of Orange County and Maria Lemus, VIP Leader at OneOC

With volunteer, training, consulting and business services, we help Orange County’s nonprofits become as effective and efficient as they are passionate about their missions.

OneOC’s mission is accelerating nonprofit success.  Our services are fully integrated, and strengthened through partnership with other local service providers. Together, we work to accelerate the success of Orange County nonprofits, enabling them to reach their full potential.  OneOC’s nonprofit partner, Big Brother Big Sisters of Orange County, currently hosts AmeriCorps VIP Fellow, Teddy Hennes as their Community Outreach Coordinator. Here, Teddy shares the impact that a story can make for a nonprofit’s mission:

“Stories are transcendent in their ability to share experiences and provide relatable identities.  We see throughout our daily lives how the act of storytelling supersedes cultures and regions as the primary way to connect us as human beings.  The people we may never meet or speak with understand us through the stories we share and the stories that are shared about us.  As such, there is no greater tool in a recruiter's possession than the expression of his or her organization's volunteer stories.  

At Big Brothers Big Sisters of Orange County, we feature the stories of our volunteer "Bigs" and mentee "Littles" to motivate the thousands of potential Bigs in our county to become actual Bigs who will create new experiences with their Littles that will be shared with our community and beyond.  That is not to say that hard numbers are unimportant from a recruitment standpoint--they are--but many individuals are not sparked because there are over 125,000 single-parent families in the area who could use our service; they are driven by the tangible impact that our Big of the Year, Richard, has had on Julio and the bond of friendship that has developed throughout their decade-long match.  It is Richard and Julio's story that connects with people in a much more profound way than statistics could solely achieve. 

Every organization has a story to tell about its volunteers, and every volunteer is a microcosm of that story.  In many of your nonprofits, these people are the difference between upholding your mission and not, so engage your potential volunteers with those relatable experiences that inspired the volunteers that came before them.”