Now I Know to Say No to Bad Volunteer Work
Why I Quit a Group with a Cause I Care About
Taking the mission of “more women in tech” into local high schools will always get me fired up. Our young people only see a short spectrum of career possibilities through the usual school activities. Building out the menu to include biotech, civic apps and even audio engineering is something we owe students as they start dreaming up who they want to be in the adult world.
I read everything I could find on the web about the new organization, and I couldn’t wait to get to work.
My passion for this cause meant I didn’t hesitate when my initial email inquiry was met with the assignment of a leadership role. I had my choice of open positions. This seemed to be an unusual way of putting together a team but I knew I was committed to wading through the awkwardness of getting started. When I decided to quit two months later, I had to ask myself a lot of questions. This experience offered a valuable reminder that the time we put into designing the volunteer experiences we offer to others adds up in the number of volunteers who show up at the next event and who even take the lead in planning the events from there.
In this situation, I was the volunteer walking away but I had often been on the other side, watching people quietly leave when I needed their help. We often tell stories about the people leaving instead of looking closely at ourselves and our organization. I had sat with my decision for days before actually stepping down. Concluding that I needed to quit wasn’t about spending more time with my family or “things” getting busy at work. This was about the organization asking for a weekly contribution of my time without a plan to make sure that the work added up to addressing the problem that motivated me to sign up in the first place.
I started volunteering and organizing volunteers before I was old enough to drive. Countless projects have done better or worse for the reliable volunteers I had working with me. I know what it means to rely on people and I have a few ideas about how to treat volunteers well.
The decision to quit the organization did not come easily but it started to look like the right thing to do. Stepping down was the most feasible answer to the questions I couldn’t resolve. How can I keep prospective volunteers from experiencing the frustration and confusion I’m experiencing? How can I make the case that the success of the organization requires thinking through the volunteer experiences we had to offer?
Volunteers deserve better than what we offer them sometimes. Too often, organization leaders act as though it’s enough to have events for supporters to attend, t-shirts for them to wear and a clever hashtag for them to share. We drape ourselves in all the colors of change-making, brag about how many people came out or posted something on social media and then hope that something is different when it’s all over. This approach then perpetuates an unhealthy dissonance between what volunteers expect to be asked to do and what so many would-be excellent organizations need them to offer. We show up in matching sneakers one day and retreat to our dark corners the next day when it all works out against us anyway. This feeling of defeat risks making those individuals harder to reach the next time, so we have to stop pretending that a clever awareness campaign is enough to bring change into the world. Change is hard work that is only getting started when it first convinces people to show up to be counted. It takes a community to make a difference.
Managing a political campaign in 2004, a volunteer who didn’t quite fit the candidate’s image showed up every time I asked for volunteers. The candidate asked how we could “lose this guy,” but this guy was essential to each campaign event’s success. He was there to help me stuff envelopes when I thought we would never get them all done, there to greet other volunteers with a friendly smile when they arrived and, eventually, there to take care of the basic set up requirements while attended to other logistics. The candidate wanted to maintain an image but I needed help from volunteers who knew the work we were doing if that image was ever going to matter. The candidate’s bad attitude meant I had to also manage the interactions between him and this young man despite a long list of other things to do.
Organizing 200 volunteers for a single-day outdoor festival, I had to contend with a board of directors who worried volunteers would show up for the free t-shirt, attend the event without paying admission and then leave without doing the work. This sad idea about their volunteers shaped all the logistics of pre-event meetings and distributing supplies. Luckily we had two volunteer coordinators so one of us could “tow the line” while the other worked behind the scenes to accommodate what worked best for the people wanting to help us host an exciting local event. In the end, the board acted like the t-shirt was prize enough for the day when they both refused to share the details of how much money the event raised and expressed doubt that there was any good reason to ask that question. I never organized volunteers for this group again and have refused to even attend the festival in the years since.
A good volunteer coordinator keeps one eye on the volunteer’s experience. He or she shouldn’t be alone in this concern, of course, but often is. So, this time, I quit before I had to juggle the shallow expectations and poor planning of an organization with little concept of the work they wanted to accomplish. I tried to facilitate a better outcome because that’s how reliable I am. I requested a leadership retreat to collaborate on a volunteer plan, communication strategy and work flow but was met with the insistence that we really needed to “bang out” a list of events instead. This is when I started to think there was another channel of activism requiring my attention.
I decided to take a stand against bad volunteer opportunities. Perhaps when I retire, it will be enough to have events to pencil in on the calendar. Barring a tragic accident, I would bet that I will still ask questions about how those events connect to the organization’s mission. I’m still going to want to know what the objective is and how we know we’re on the right trajectory for meeting it. I’m still going to believe that these answers are essential to the well-being of the group and the odds of its success.
If you’re recruiting volunteers without answers to these questions, you don’t have anything to offer them even if you have the coolest parties and the most clever photo booth props. The hashtag you’re looking for is #busywork.
