During the Points of Light Conference held at the New Orleans Marriott, social impact professionals packed shelter-in-place kits for the local community — an initiative guided by a local affiliate.

During his 1988 Republican National Convention acceptance speech, former President George H.W. Bush emphasized the importance of civic engagement, likening volunteers to “a brilliant diversity spread like stars, like a thousand points of light in a broad and peaceful sky.” In 1990, his simile was made manifest in the founding of the Points of Light Foundation, promoting non-governmental solutions to social issues.

Beth Pann

Thirty-six years later, Points of Light, billed as “the world’s leading volunteer organization,” works with a global network of 120 nonprofit organizations across 34 states and 32 countries. “We’re all about active volunteering and President Bush’s belief that every action matters and everybody has some agency to make a difference in their communities,” Beth Pann, Points of Light’s senior vice president, strategic partnerships and convenings, told Convene. “Our mission is to inspire, equip, and mobilize people to take action through volunteering and civic engagement.”

Points of Light’s annual three-day conference draws approximately 1,500 leaders from philanthropy, nonprofits, and faith-based organizations from every state and 20-plus countries. Convene asked Pann to share the organization’s strategy for engaging social impact leaders in social impact projects at its annual conference.

Working From the Inside

Points of Light relies heavily on local expertise in each host destination to help shape the participant experience, including community service opportunities. In fact, it’s a part of the organization’s model. “It starts with local leadership,” Pann said. “In each area, we have a nonprofit affiliate that is part of the Points of Light Network [which then becomes] a co-host of the conference, elevating their recognition in the community and [forging] the connections that they have. We make an investment in their organization for being a co-host.”

The affiliate works with Points of Light to convene a volunteer host committee — typically 30 to 40 individuals from local nonprofits, companies, universities, and faith-based organizations. “It’s a way for us to ensure that we’re infusing the culture of service in that city and in that region, in the conference,” Pann said. “They really support the overall planning from what we do on the stage to what we’re doing in workshops to networking to the service project.”

Points of Light seeks out those service projects that will have “a lasting impact in the community,” Pann said, and the host committee “helps inform what that project is. It really is something that’s focused on meeting the community needs.” In Washington, D.C., where the conference will take place June 22-25, 2026, “we are focused on food insecurity: One in three people in the region is food insecure. We’re in the process right now of doing something on site and in the community so that we can give a broader range of attendees the opportunity to have a touchpoint into that service project.”

On- and Off-Site

Pann said that after the pandemic, Points of Light shifted to on-site service projects to increase engagement, but this year marks a return to organizing an additional off-site project that was “in process” when Convene spoke with her.

Prior to COVID, service projects in a community might have included a clean-up at a park. While that wasn’t part of the program in Chicago at the 2024 conference, volunteer environmentalism was covered in a session. A post on the National Environmental Education Foundation (NEEF) website described how NEEF representative Kelly Burnett and Megan Urban, from the National Park Service’s Big Thicket National Preserve in Texas, shared lessons learned from National Public Lands Day (NPLD) with the audience. For more than three decades, NPLD has been the nation’s largest single-day volunteer effort, held every year on the fourth Saturday of September, with more than 1,000 organized events from trail maintenance to tree planting to beach clean-ups.

Last year in New Orleans, Points of Light Conference participants packed shelter-in-place kits on site. “It’s something that HandsOn New Orleans, our affiliate there, does at this time of year that supports the local community,” Pann said. But the host committee’s first-hand insights about the destination went beyond informing community service activities. “When we go to a community, we can’t assume that we know everything,” she said. “We really need to rely on the local community to guide us. Last year was the 20th anniversary of Hurricane Katrina, and one of the things we heard loud and clear from that host committee is that the only people who should be talking about Hurricane Katrina on the stage should be from New Orleans. There are nuances like that, that are really important when we go into communities and that really reflect that culture of service and help us uplift that.”

With the 2026 conference being held during the country’s 250th anniversary, Points of Light is encouraging participants to also spend time in the D.C. area to experience the legacy of volunteering in the city. The D.C. nonprofit 51 Steps to Freedom’s augmented reality walking tour highlights organizations, museums, and cultural institutions of interest to event participants. It’s an opportunity to take a “look at some of the pivotal moments over our history where volunteers have mobilized and made significant efforts,” Pann said, “but the majority of the conference is really focused on the future. What does the future need from us?”

She cited a stat: About 90 percent of nonprofit organizations rely on volunteers to fulfill their missions. “If you think about the work that volunteers do throughout the world, it’s really urgent and … essential to healthy communities here in the U.S. and around the world.” Because volunteering has declined over the past few decades, Pann said, “we really want to lean in and elevate the power of volunteers. One of the things that we’re focused on is moving the needle on volunteering from being viewed as nice to being viewed as necessary. We’re going to be launching an initiative to double the number of volunteers by 2035. It’s a very significant effort.”

A New Generation

“From a volunteer perspective, a lot of attention is on Gen Z,” Points of Light’s Beth Pann said. “How do we engage Gen Z in communities? What do they really care about?”

To arrive at those answers, Points of Light is partnering for the first time at the 2026 conference with the National Youth Leadership Council (NYLC). “They have a 37-year-old conference called the National Service-Learning Conference and we’re uniting that conference with the Points of Light Conference,” Pann said. Young people aged 16 to 24 will be attending the conference along with educators, “to create an unprecedented gathering where youth leaders and global changemakers stand side by side as equals,” according to NYLC’s website.

The partnership “is really a statement about the value and the impact of youth voice and the work that young people are doing, and the fact that their age really doesn’t matter when it comes to volunteering and civic engagement and impact,” Pann said. “We’re really excited about the infusion of their energy into the conference.”

Michelle Russell is Convene’s editor-in-chief.

On the Web

Learn more about the 2026 Points of Light Conference.