Deborah Cooke and Trisha Choi knew there was a better way to manage the thousands of volunteers

(3BLMedia/theCSRfeed) October 25, 2010 - "Amazing things are happening here" is NewYork-Presbyterian Hospital's slogan, and amazing things are certainly happening in its Volunteer Services Department.  

With over 3,000 volunteers working in 5 different locations, few would label the programs at NewYork-Presbyterian (NYP) program as "small."  Yet through an innovative model termed the Volunteer Ladder©, Deborah Cooke, Volunteer Coordinator, and Trisha Choi, Manager of Volunteer Services, have managed to build a sense of community and collective purpose that permeates the halls of one of the most comprehensive university hospitals in the world.

Cooke is a program coordinator of volunteer services at NYP.  Six years ago, while working with volunteers in an elder care program at the hospital, Cooke saw just how much volunteers impact patients and each other.  To help volunteers feel connected, supported, and engaged, Cooke began assigning her more experienced volunteers to assist with the training of newer ones.  From the start, the feedback was very positive, and soon the Volunteer Ladder© began to take shape....

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VolunteerMatch is a national nonprofit dedicated to strengthening communities by helping great people and great causes to connect. Our award-winning online service, www.volunteermatch.org, makes it easy to find a way to make a difference by location, expertise, or availability. VolunteerMatch provides many of the nation's most recognized businesses, campuses and organizations with Web-based solutions to facilitate and track volunteer engagement at local and national levels. As the #1 ranking for "volunteer" on Google and Yahoo!, the VolunteerMatch network regularly welcomes more than 190,000 visitors each week and has become the preferred volunteer recruiting service for tens of thousands of participating nonprofits across the country.

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