Bridging Formal and Informal Volunteerism - An Interview with Brianna Stapleton Welch

Brianna smiles at the camera while standing in front of a colorful mural painted on a brick wall. She has short brown hair and is wearing an orange blazer over an olive green shirt. She is also wearing a gold necklace with a crescent-shaped pendant.

Brianna Stapleton Welch and I connected at a conference in late 2024. Shortly after, she subscribed to my newsletter and we’ve stayed in touch ever since. Shameless plug: sign up for my newsletter by visiting www.learnwithjpp.com/resources and get my three most-downloaded resources!  

I recently invited Brianna to a one-on-one chat to learn more about her work at Little Free Library. I was familiar with little free libraries because I’ve seen book sharing boxes in my neighborhood. What I didn’t know was that Little Free Library is a registered US nonprofit that works with partners like book publishers, and supports volunteers across America! Interestingly… Some of those volunteers don’t think of themselves as volunteers! 

Today, we are sharing a truncated version of our conversation with you. Enjoy!

JPP: Thanks for chatting with me! Can I start by asking you how you came to join the team at Little Free Library?

BSW: I joined Little Free Library in 2023 but I have to go a bit further back to tell the full story. 

I started my career in the theatre world which led me to working at a nonprofit theater company. One day, they asked if I could manage the company's volunteers that summer. That led me to working in a variety of different youth educational roles where I worked with volunteers to deliver youth programming. 

From there, I went to work with a technical college. My role involved meeting with students and helping them identify service-learning and volunteer experiences, sort of like a matchmaker for volunteerism. I was the advisor of a campus student group called the Volunteer Center.

I loved that role and met so many amazing people including leaders of volunteers across my city. When the COVID shutdowns happened, I had to get more creative about connecting students with online volunteering. 

This time encouraged me to reflect more deeply about making change in communities and about my own development as a person who engages volunteers. I started considering how volunteering doesn't necessarily mean showing up at a 501c3 registered nonprofit to do something at a certain time, and in a very specific role. I started thinking about informal volunteering, like when people help family members and their neighbors. 

Because the college had many International students, I talked with them about different approaches to volunteering all over the world. This broadened my understanding of volunteering to more of a focus on community connections. 

At the same time, I was isolating with my family at home throughout 2020. We had been meaning to start a Little Free Library in our yard, so, my husband built one and I stocked it with books. We registered our book-sharing box with the Little Free Library organization and I got on their mailing list. 

Fast forward to 2023, when the Little Free Library email newsletter shared that they were hiring for a Community Engagement Manager. And… here I am! 

JPP: That is so cool. When you and your family put the Little Free Library up, did you know that Little Free Library the nonprofit existed?

BSW: Yes! I’m from Wisconsin and the organization started in Hudson, WI. While I worked at the technical college, one of the activities I facilitated with students was collecting books and sharing them with Little Free Libraries using the map app. It was a safer way for them to get involved while social distancing, no matter where they lived.

JPP: So tell me what leading volunteers with Little Free Library looks like. I would imagine that it’s quite different from your role at the technical college. For example, you likely don’t meet most of the volunteers you work with!

BSW: We have two different categories of volunteers at Little Free Library. There are the people that we call stewards. These are people who usually install the Little Free Library book sharing boxes. Or, they might be people who've adopted them over time. 

The steward is the designated caretaker of that book sharing box. I have a coworker who is the Steward Services Manager; they support that type of volunteer.

When I started at the organization, there were people contacting the organization who aren't stewards but want to get involved in some way. They love Little Free Libraries, visiting book sharing boxes, and supporting our mission, but they aren’t willing or able to be stewards right now. 

Little Free Library’s leadership team charged me with finding pathways to get these potential volunteers involved in the organization.

We also know that there are so many people supporting our mission by sharing books, repairing book sharing boxes, or informally adopting a Little Free Library without being in the steward role. 

My work involves finding solutions to questions like: How do we build opportunities for people to tell us what they're doing and capture those stories? How can those people register as Little Free Library volunteers? How can people keep helping informally but still access our support if they want?

JPP: Wow. So you had to build a system where there would be formal practices in place, while allowing for flexibility. That’s not easy!

BSW: It’s not. But what grounds our work are the community connections.  

Many community connections are happening organically. For example, a steward may need help with fixing their book sharing box and they reach out to a friend who is handy. But, there are other connections that need more support. 

So, I’m here to matchmake! A steward may submit a request that says, “I’m in Santa Clara, California and really need some help with getting children's books for early readers, because those are going so quickly in my Little Free Library.” I’m here to connect them with a volunteer in their area and help them build that relationship. 

In larger metro areas, I’ll post the volunteer opportunity on Volunteer Match and our website. The role description will ask for someone to collaborate with the steward and go to the location once a month with some children’s books for early readers.  

In smaller towns, I find that it’s better to provide the steward with outreach tools like role description templates to find the volunteer support they need. Volunteer recruitment sites may be less effective in those communities where many people already know one another and how best to connect with their neighbors. 

All of these volunteer connections are part of ourTeam LFL program, which provides them with support from our team. 

JPP: I love that you’re listening to communities and adapting your approach for different needs and strengths to tackle challenges. 

What other inquiries about volunteering often land in your inbox?

BSW: I get emails from youth-focused organizations like Boy Scouts or Girl Scouts. They are looking for something really hands-on that they can do as a group. Installing a Little Free Library often feels like a natural fit.

In some cases, it’s a great project! If the book sharing box is installed at a community center or a school, the youth group can kind of designate a community or person to steward that book sharing box over time. 

But, sometimes book sharing boxes get abandoned because there is no steward and youth who installed it grow up or move away. We want to avoid that.

So, we now have a service project planning guide that asks questions like:

• Why do you think a Little Free Library is needed here? 

• Why is book access important for your community?

• Who will take care of the book sharing box ten years from now?

  
  

The guide encourages them to talk to people like librarians, parents, teachers, and booksellers. It points them to look at book access data on Unite for Literacy’s Book Desert Map. We are asking these youth to think more about the root causes of book access barriers before designing their projects. 

If the book sharing boxes nearby don’t have books that appeal to young readers or others who live there, we might point the youth group towards starting a book drive. 

I worked with a Girl Scout troop in a community with many book sharing boxes in need of repair. They made door hangers that said “We noticed your Little Free Library. When we visited, the door was broken. We're handy and we want to fix it for you. Call this number.” They put an adult's phone number on there and the community connection was made! It was great! 

The girls realized they didn’t have to put in a new Little Free Library. But, there was still a way to help. 

JPP: I love how you have done away with the traditional model of, “Here’s the one volunteer offer- take it or leave it.” Instead, you are saying, “Here's a critical thinking exercise about how your group can help the community and what is the best help to give based on what the community needs and what your group can offer.” 

I also love how like, yes, the name of the organization is Little Free Library, but really the mission is about book access and it's more than the physical book sharing box. 

So when people contact you about supporting the mission, do they consider themselves volunteers or do they have a different name for themselves? 

BSW: That's a great question. If they are contacting me, they’ll usually ask, “How can I help?”

From there, I’ll send them information about how they can sign up for one of our open volunteer roles. If they register as a Team LFL volunteer, they are added to our mailing list and we share volunteer resources and opportunities for recognition. 

Some stewards may not identify themselves as volunteers. They see their role maintaining the box as being part of the book sharing gift economy in their community. 

There are a lot of people who are using the Little Free Library app to find book sharing boxes and putting books inside. They might check in on the app and earn badges, so, the terminology “app user” might resonate with them most, since they haven’t signed up as a Team LFL volunteer.

Some might just see a book sharing box in their community when they're walking around and put books inside. I would bet that those people don't think of themselves as volunteers. They may not even know that the Little Free Library network exists. They might think of themselves as supporters or fans or visitors. Or sometimes people call themselves patrons. 

Because of our unique model, we are at the intersection of formal and informal volunteering.

JPP: What's it like working at the intersection of formal and informal volunteering? I know that Little Free Library has partnerships with publishers, which must be quite formal. At the same time, you have people who may share books all the time but never interact with your mailing list, social media, app, or website. 

How do you balance these two extremes? And what tips do you have for folks who might be in a similar boat?

BSW: I'm really lucky in that the organization had developed the Little Free Library app tool before I started, which in some ways helps us quantify some data.

We also ask stewards every year, “How many books do you think you've shared through your box?”

This quantifiable impact is helpful to share with funders who want to support our work in communities that need it most. In general, organizational leadership, boards, and potential funders want numbers to understand how we’re working toward our mission. 

I've been learning a lot from folks in the volunteer engagement world like Sue Carter Kahl and Breauna Dorealus who talk about evaluation and what is appropriate to quantify and what's not. I’m trying to reimagine evaluation in a way that doesn't make volunteers feel like they are just here to clock in and clock out and tell us the number of hours. 

I built tools that we use to collect volunteer impact stories, and in those, I ask questions like:

• What connections did you make?

• How many books did you share?

• How did you feel about the experience?

• Did you encounter any surprises or challenges?

• Which of the three cornerstones of our mission (expanding book access, building community, and inspiring readers) did you feel most connected with? 

  
  

JPP: How do you collect this story-based data? In a form? 

BSW: Yes! We call it an impact form and it’s part of the GivePulse volunteer engagement platform. After someone signs up for Team LFL, they’ll get an automated series of emails with tips and information on how to use the app. At a certain point, they get an email asking them to share their impact through the form. 

We also have quarterly newsletters that go out to volunteers, which will share impact stories and encourage other volunteers to submit their impacts. That usually leads to more stories coming in through the form. 

If I have matched a volunteer and a steward directly, I will do check-ins with both parties to see how the match went via email, and link to the impact form. 

JPP: Building automation into volunteer stewardship activities is so satisfying! Are there other automations that help you along the volunteer engagement cycle?

BSW: Yes! I’m always trying to bridge the formal to the informal. So, people who check in at Little Free Libraries through the app now get a pop up after they’ve checked in a certain number of times asking, “Do you want to be a volunteer?”

JPP: Brilliant! You’re recruiting from people who are already engaged, and presenting the opportunity to formalize the relationship. 

Tell me more about how you bring new volunteers onto the team. Since it’s pretty unlikely that you’ll meet them, how do you get to know them personally? 

BSW: When I started in this role, I met with a lot of different literacy organizations and partners of Little Free Library to learn about how they work with volunteers. Through those conversations, I got to know Family Literacy of Georgia, which had the coolest volunteer interest form I had ever seen.  

So, I borrowed some of those questions and wrote some similar open-ended ones like, “What would make this a meaningful volunteer experience for you?” 

JPP: Do you make these questions optional?

BSW: Yes. But, I find they get pretty good uptake. When I get those responses, I try to build special moments into the volunteer experience. For example, I once saw a response that said, “It’d be nice to know if there’s a real person on the other end of this process.” So, I sent them an email introducing myself since they said it was important for them to know.  

It's not a perfect system but I think those who respond are revealing insights to help me understand what volunteers want to feel connected. 

JPP: This is something I’ve thought a bit about lately: how do we balance gathering rich data and providing meaningful personalized experiences with making things easy and accessible? You’ve really shown that we shouldn’t shy away from asking the questions that take longer to answer.  

In two years, you’ve done a lot in your role! So, what’s next? What does the future look like for Little Free Library volunteers?

BSW: One of our next frontiers is building ways for people to connect in-person on a local level. It can be a little bit lonely to just, you know, take your box of books and go put them in boxes. You might never see who gets them or who enjoyed them. 

Sometimes those encounters happen serendipitously, which I love hearing about through the impact forms. People have shared that they just put a book in and as they walked away, a little kid went up and pulled out the book with excitement. 

That’s got to be an amazing feeling and I want to make it not just a lucky thing. So my goal is to build opportunities for the volunteers and the stewards to connect in person, and to share resources and ideas.

JPP: Please keep me posted on how that goes! Before we wrap up, is there anything else you’d like to share? 

BSW: For the volunteer engagement professionals reading, I love to experience the processes at other organizations and learn. 

I'm not trying to steal ideas from every opportunity but I do look at other organization's processes and consider: Is there space for that in my work? How could I learn from that and adapt our systems? 

If any volunteer engagement professionals want to connect with me about the behind the scenes processes of their work, they should reach out to me on LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/brianna-stapleton-welch-bb13614a/ 

JPP: Brianna, I learned so much from this conversation. Thank you for sharing your experiences and insights. 

BSW: You’re welcome! Talk soon! 

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