I love working with volunteers. In fact as an ordained minister, I work for volunteers. It’s an interesting balancing act, to serve people and attempt through one’s leadership to inspire the best people have to offer and at the same time as a trained staff person be on the lookout for safety and security concerns that arise in all workplaces. Given the litigious times we live in all staff in non-profit organizations need to maintain a constant vigilance to potential red flags of legal jeopardy. But litigious times or not all of us owe it to the most vulnerable people we serve to offer our best, we truly have a “duty to care” for each other to the best of our ability.
Volunteers come with a variety of motivations, skill sets and training. Non-profits are truly an organic whole that are constituted with persons who would never have been “hired” to work at the same office. Paid staff at non-profits make a profound error when they assume they can “train up” or standardize volunteers into some kind of well-oiled machine, like the one they worked with at a business office or government centre. To expect efficiency like you experienced in an environment where a) everyone is paid and expected to work 40+ hours a week and b) the infrastructure is bankrolled by a property owner or the government is not only unrealistic it also potentially drains precious resources, moving them to the conceit of perfection and away from the very people whom the non-profit was set up to serve.
Volunteers want to serve. Volunteers are excited to show up, roll up their sleeves and contribute to a cause greater than self. As a minister my greatest joy is to assist people to discern their own role in such an organic whole. Over coffee I ask new people how they would like to be involved. Hearing how the new person feels connected to the vision of the church I ask how they want to be involved. At the end of the coffee I give the new person a name and number of someone at the church engaged in this mission and hope a connection can be made. I usually circle around a few weeks later to see if the connection was made, how things are going and if there needs to be another or different pathway to service.
All the while I try my best to maintain a culture where it is clear I work for the volunteers and not the other way around. Even when I need to occasionally assert a concern about how we are doing things I make it clear this concern is less my own fetish for perfection and more a concern for the potential harm an activity might cause to one of our vulnerable volunteers. If volunteers know the “red flag” I am waving has more to with their own safety and security than “getting my own way” or trying to rise to the fantasy heights of perfection they will be far more open to entertaining a change in behavior or church tradition.
One thing I have observed about churches that try to standardize and legislate certain kinds of volunteer offerings, the church ends up with pristine protocols and no volunteers. Volunteers vote with their feet. While I never sweat the loss of a volunteer who refuses to consider the potential harm their offering might inflict on someone under their care I would feel deeply sad to know that even one volunteer stepped away because the standards we expected were so high that s/he felt it was easier to just “stay home”.
In the end when I am about suggest a change in church culture I ask myself this simple question, “is the suggested change necessary, does it in fact address a concern that has the potential to create problems for our church OR is this just a way of getting the church to do things the way I prefer?” Finally, there is also the need to know what resources are present, there are less resources and less trained workers in a non-profit organization and thus if one is coming from a school environment or a business one cannot expect that things are going to move as rapidly or as efficiently or with the attention to perfection as one experienced in the past. It’s just not in the cards. Better to let go of that expectation and accept what the Spirit offers, in all of its beautiful and messy manifestations.