Investigating American Cancer Society Volunteer Experience

The nonprofit sector is crucial for a vital economy, and volunteers are at the core of many of these organizations. Research has shown many different factors related to nonprofit organization success, including volunteer management, recruitment, and retention techniques. This study adds to the current literature by investigating the American Cancer Society Relay For Life Advisory Team and explores what factors have led to the retention of these high-level volunteers, what skill-based trainings have they received throughout their volunteer career with the American Cancer Society, and what sentiment do the volunteers have toward receiving spokesperson training, facilitation training, and coaching training. Using a single, descriptive, instrumental case study design, an open-ended response questionnaire was disseminated to 31 current Relay Advisory Team volunteers. Through using coding analysis, four major themes were identified from the responses to the question “why did you begin to volunteer for the American Cancer Society?: having a personal connection to cancer; someone asked them to get involved; participants were looking for a way to give back and make a difference; and participants were looking for a sense of community and belonging. In analyzing the question “why do you continue to volunteer for the American Cancer Society?” three major themes were identified: the desire of a cure for cancer to be found, participants felt that the American Cancer Society is a reputable organization, and a belief in the mission of the American Cancer Society. Lastly, the volunteers had received a range of trainings in the past, and had a positive sentiment toward receiving spokesperson, coaching, and facilitation trainings in the future. The finding of this study can be used to inform American Cancer Society volunteer recruitment and retention techniques

On Visibility Representations of Non-planar Graphs

A rectangle visibility representation (RVR) of a graph consists of an assignment of axis-aligned rectangles to vertices such that for every edge there exists a horizontal or vertical line of sight between the rectangles assigned to its endpoints. Testing whether a graph has an RVR is known to be NP-hard. In this paper, we study the problem of finding an RVR under the assumption that an embedding in the plane of the input graph is fixed and we are looking for an RVR that reflects this embedding. We show that in this case the problem can be solved in polynomial time for general embedded graphs and in linear time for 1-plane graphs (i.e., embedded graphs having at most one crossing per edge). The linear time algorithm uses a precise list of forbidden configurations, which extends the set known for straight-line drawings of 1-plane graphs. These forbidden configurations can be tested for in linear time, and so in linear time we can test whether a 1-plane graph has an RVR and either compute such a representation or report a negative witness. Finally, we discuss some extensions of our study to the case when the embedding is not fixed but the RVR can have at most one crossing per edge