WEB: But we are talking about a volunteer program here...

[Rod Clark]

Elaine wrote:
> Nan, I loved your previous post about the 4 reasons why people join
> a volunteer organization : for praise, for accomplishments, for
> belonging to a respected ISP organization, or influence over
> others. ...

Nan wrote: 
> > 2.  Volunteers are _part_ of the best way to get that work done.
> > 
> >      In an all-volunteer setting they are the only way.  But even
> > where there is paid staff, volunteers add a level of value ...

Elaine wrote:
> Are we really an all-volunteer organization?
> Are some people being paid or in the process of being paid?

Elaine, 

   That's a possibility sometime in the next few years, if and
when fundraising can grow (it would have to grow hugely) to
support having a full-time executive director and office staff.
But that might be years in the future.

   For now, some things that volunteers had been doing
(registration processing, mostly) is sent out to a small company
that does that kind of work for nonprofits who are too small to
have their own staff. It costs a few hundred dollars a month to
have them do that, but apparently this has improved the
registration situation quite a bit compared to when it was done
by volunteers. This is something that might someday be done by
regular SCN office staff, if SCN would ever have any, and an
office to put them in. Some things like this are just more
realistic to have an office staff doing.

> Is it ethical for a person to be a volunteer all the time seeking
> to convert this nonpayer into a paying job not for every volunteer
> but for a select few--the rest of the volunteers to be recycled the
> old volunteers are "killed" (emotionally).

   No one wants people to be "killed," either by the work itself
or by their feelings about the organization. But I remember
someone opining last year that going from an all-volunteer
organization to having paid staff tends to result in a
"bloodbath" among volunteers. I think it was Lorraine who
mentioned that, about her experience with an org where she was a
board member. (Was it the Audobon Society? - but they seem like
such nice quiet bird-ish people, not given to "bloodbaths" and
internal warfare.) Maybe this is one of those human-nature
reactions that there's no way around, other than to try to
lessen the dissatisfaction that it might cause someday. In
reality, SCN's budget is inadequate to do anything other than
argue about this for a long time yet.

Rod Clark

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