Tag Archives: volunteering

International Association of Fire Fighters is anti-volunteer

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Some of the most vocal opponents to volunteers being used to replace employees and save money are volunteer managers and volunteer management consultants.

Yes, the people who are in charge of promoting volunteer involvement in nonprofits and in singing the praises of volunteers are the same people who balk at the idea of paid staff being let go and replaced with unpaid staff in order to balance the books.

We volunteer managers and volunteer management consultants believe passionately that volunteers have a much more important value than saving money:

  • involving volunteers gives community members a first-hand look at organizations and issues important to their neighborhoods, environments and families.
  • involving volunteers gives the community a feeling of ownership in an organization or issue.
  • involving volunteers creates advocates for an organization or issue, advocates that a lot of government officials and potential funders will listen to with particular interest since they have no financial stake in the organization they are promoting.
  • involving volunteers gives a diversity of people a voice in the organizations that involve them.
  • involving volunteers augments the work of paid employees.
  • some tasks are more appropriate for volunteers than paid staff, not because of level of responsibility but because of the kind of task. This can include everything from mentoring programs to disaster services (the majority of services by the American Red Cross and Girl Scouts of the USA, to name but two organizations, are delivered by volunteers, and that is NOT to save money!)

We volunteer managers and volunteer management consultants continually speak out against volunteers used as replacements for paid staff in order to save money.

So it’s with a great deal of confusion, sadness, and even anger that I recently discovered that the International Association of Fire Fighters, a labor union in the USA representing professional firefighters, is against volunteer firefighters:

Let me be as clear as possible. We as a union, by Convention actions, do not represent or condone volunteer, part-time or paid on-call fire fighters… We as a union, by Convention actions, do not represent or condone volunteer, part-time or paid on-call fire fighters… Although an IAFF member may make a personal choice to join a volunteer fire department, that personal choice is one that can have serious consequences under our Constitution, including the loss of IAFF membership.

Harold A. Schaitberger
General President
International Association of Fire Fighters
September 20, 2002 letter to all IAFF Affiliate Presidents 1

Volunteer firefighters could have stood side-by-side with IAFF members and fought against budget cuts or efforts to replace paid staff with volunteers over the years. Volunteer firefighters could have fought together to ensure firefighting programs are fully funded. They could have been united in calls for firefighters, paid or volunteer, to receive all the training that is needed among all firefighters, paid or unpaid. Instead, the IAFF has declared war on volunteer firefighters — and volunteers in general.

In a meeting with a representative of the State of Oregon Fire Training Section last year, I was informed that the agency makes no distinction among professionals or volunteers when delivering or certifying firefighting training. To them, they are all firefighters, and they are judged on their official credentials and experience, period, not whether or not they are paid.

As it should be.

Before 1850, no city in the USA had fully paid, full-time firefighters.2 Cities began to employ full-time firefighters when people realized full-time firefighters were needed to deal with the number and kind of fires happening in large cities. The USA is now a mix of paid and volunteer-staffed fire houses. But at some point, some paid fire fighters in the USA decided volunteers were a threat. And the IAFF has made that schism official.

This is in stark contrast with Germany, a country that is frequently derided by various folks here in the USA for being too inflexible in its labor laws and government social safety nets, all of which are most definitely pro-labor. It may come as a shock to you, if that’s your point of view, that Germany has a much longer tradition of volunteer firefighting than the USA; many of its volunteer fire companies are much older than our own country. Paid firefighters see no threat from volunteer firefighters, and the firefighting union there happily allows professional firefighters to volunteer in fire fighting stations in their own villages where they live (in contrast to the big cities where they work). I can find no record of a professional fire station in Germany having been converted into an all-volunteer station in order to save money. Even now, Germany has more volunteer firefighters, per capita, than in the USA, and no professional firefighter has lost his or her job to a volunteer.

IAFF’s position on volunteer firefighters is outdated, misguided, outrageous and wrong-headed. It does nothing to protect the jobs of paid firefighters. The consequences of that stand are to the detriment of communities, citizens and environments — and even to paid firefighters themselves.

I could also write an entire blog about the fallacy of the word “International” in IAFF’s title, but I’ll save that for another time.

I hope that state and local volunteer management associations all over the USA will take a public stand on this issue. Please blog about it. Please put something in your Facebook status about it. Tweet about it. Put something in your newsletter about it. Maybe we can help IAFF see that volunteers are not a threat, that volunteers are, in fact, in support of career firefighters. Maybe IAFF members will seek new leadership that understands this.

More:

1 Schaitberger’s comments have disappeared from the IAFF web site since this blog was originally published.

2 Ditzel, Paul C. Fire Engines, Firefighters: the Men, Equipment, and Machines, from Colonial Days to the Present. New York: Crown, 1976.

Volunteerism FAIL

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The Town and Country Inn and restaurant in Chattanooga, Tennessee (USA), was a for-profit business. Then it laid off 14 of its paid staff, who were being paid minimum wage ($7.25/hour) and room and board. It then asked these former employees to sign papers formalizing their transition from employee status to “residency volunteer status” with the newly formed Town and Country Foundation, and agreeing to undertake tasks in return for their housing — tasks that are the same as what they were being paid to do before. The motel claims to have organized a nonprofit foundation, but there’s no listing of a board of directors anywhere for the public to read, no mission statement, no volunteer recruitment strategy, and the owner of Town and Country, David Bernstein, seems to believe he still owns the organization, even though, as a nonprofit, it’s now owned by the board of directors — whomever they are.

I have talked about the appropriateness — and inappropriateness — of increasing volunteer-involvement in response to budget cuts before, most recently in this blog, Going all-volunteer in dire economic times: use with caution, which focuses on local volunteers in a small community in the state of Washington that mobilized to get a national forest center operating again, staffed entirely by members of the local community. While the national forest center went all-volunteer for all the right reasons (though I still had a lot of cautions about that), the Town and Country Inn and restaurant is exploiting volunteers and its nonprofit status, period.

An organization should involve volunteers because the organization wants to involve the community in its work and give people without a financial interest in the organization a firsthand look at how things work. It should involve volunteers to reach constituencies/demographics not current reached among staff and clients. And, most importantly, it should involve volunteers because volunteers are more appropriate to undertake certain tasks, rather than paid staff, not to save money, but because clients prefer to deal with volunteers, because it gives the community ownership of the program, etc.

Give certain nonprofit organizations all the money they need to hire all the paid employees they need and the Girl Scouts of the USA, the American Red Cross, and many other organizations, large and small, would still deliver the majority of their services with volunteers. Why? Because there are many services that are best delivered by volunteers, and because the strength of these organizations comes from the volunteers being the primary owners of these organizations.

The US Department of Labor is, supposedly, investigating what’s happening in Chattanooga. One question on the IRS form to establish a nonprofit in the USA asks whether the new entity is the successor of an old entity and, if it is, the business must explain that transistion — I think we all should see that answer.

Let’s hope these federal agencies are, indeed, investigating. Because this is wrong in every way.

More at the Nonprofit Quarterly and Chattanooga Free Press.

But virtual volunteering means it takes no time, right?

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In addition to researching and writing about virtual volunteering, I’m also almost always engaged in the practice, either as an online volunteer, or as a manager of online volunteers.

I recently recruited online volunteers to help with identifying some outreach targets for a nonprofit organization I’m working with. First, I used a volunteer recruitment web site, posting a very detailed task description and asking for a commitment only 3 – 5 hours a week through the rest of the year. For those who expressed interest, I had an oh-so-short screening process: a few questions via email. Their answers show me how well they communicate via the written word, if they truly understand the importance of a prompt response, and if they really do read a message completely. 

One of the questions is regarding when the volunteer is planning on working on the assignment: is there a particular day and time they are going to specifically set aside for getting the task done? This question throws a lot of online volunteering candidates. As one put it: “I don’t understand this question, because I thought this was a virtual volunteering assignment.” It didn’t surprise me when that volunteer dropped out after just a week, without doing the assignment.

While an online volunteer can do his or her assignment whenever and, often, wherever, he or she wants to — at 3 a.m., during a four-hour layover at a wired airport, etc. — virtual volunteering takes real time. I’ve worked with online volunteers since 1994, and I’ve found that those volunteers who make a plan for getting an assignment done — who identify a day and time when their work is going to happen — actually get the assignment done. Those who expect available time to spontaneously materialize for getting the assignment done instead send me an email explaining all the many reasons they are unable to fulfill their commitment, always along the lines of “some unexpected things came up.”

Virtual volunteering takes real time and a real commitment, however small, however micro, and there is nothing virtual about the organization’s need for the assignment to get done.

Screening volunteers, even for micro-volunteering assignments, will cut down significantly on the number of “Oops, I didn’t realize I actually didn’t have time to do this. Sorry!” emails you will get from new online volunteers. Your online screening process does not have to be long; it can be done via email, with just a few questions a candidate could complete in just 10 minutes. Don’t be surprised if more than 50% of people who said they were interested in volunteering online with your organization drop out at this point – but isn’t that better than them dropping out after they have officially been given an assignment?

How to screen online volunteers is just one of the many topics that will be explored in-depth in the revised Virtual Volunteering Guidebook, which will be published in 2011. Stay tuned!

Read more about the myths of online volunteering/virtual volunteering.

Too late to volunteer for the holidays?

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The rush began weeks ago: people calling soup kitchens, homeless shelters, Meals on Wheels, hospices, animal shelters and other places providing meals and shelter for people (and others) in need, asking if they can help serve food in November and December, specifically on Thanksgiving and Christmas. Look on the Community Service board on YahooAnswers and you will see messages from various people, teens in particular, trying to line up a simple volunteering gig for the winter holidays — one that will take just two or three hours to do, and not clash with their own Thanksgiving meal.

The vast majority of these potential volunteers will be turned away, because of the extreme popularity of short-term, fell-good volunteering activities at Thanksgiving and Christmas — there simply is not enough of these kinds of non-critical, easy tasks for all interested volunteers to do.

The reality is this:

    • Organizations that serve food to groups have their openings for volunteers during the holidays booked months in advance.

 

  • Most economically or socially-disadvantaged people in the USA find family to be with during the holidays. Most people staying in homeless shelters go to a family members home on Thanksgiving or Christmas Day (varies from shelter to shelter, but overall, this is, indeed, the case). That means that many shelters and soup kitchens don’t serve hoards of people on Thanksgiving or Christmas.

 

 

  • Most organizations don’t have activities available that people can waltz in, do in two or three hours, and leave, never to volunteer again until next Thanksgiving. Just as with for-profit businesses, there are few assignments “laying around” at nonprofits, waiting for just anyone who might have some time to do; tasks that need to be done at nonprofit organizations require capable people who are properly supported and supervised, to ensure work is of the highest quality; nonprofits and those they serve deserve nothing less!

 

For volunteers: here is a detailed resource on finding short-term volunteering during the holidays.

For nonprofits: You know more than anyone that it’s very difficult to develop a one-time, non-critical, just-show-up volunteer activity that is worth all the time expense, particularly during November and December. But developing these activities can be worth doing if you can focus the  activity on cultivating support for your organization and its work beyond the just-show-up-for-a-few-hours task (micro-volunteering). Think of an environmental organization that sponsors a beach clean up: yes, there’s a clean beach at the end of the day, but there is also a database full of contact information for people who are potential financial donors and volunteers for more substantial, critical activities. Looking at this resource for volunteers can help you think about developing a simple activity for volunteers during the holiday you can leverage to cultivate longer term volunteers and donors — or, at least, to educate more people about the work your organization does and its impact in the community.

Sad news re: Volunteering England

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Volunteering England, the primary institution in England for tracking, supporting and celebrating volunteering in the country, has announced today that it is consulting with its staff and trade union on proposals for restructuring which would reduce its staffing from 55 to 24 posts. The organization is facing a potential 60 per cent cut in strategic partner funding.

In a press release, Chief Executive of Volunteering England Justin Davis Smith said, “It is heartbreaking we are planning to make redundant so many colleagues who bring extraordinary commitment to the cause of volunteering and have so much knowledge and experience to offer the volunteering movement and our whole society.”

At a time when governments all over the world are encouraging citizens to volunteer more than ever before, at a time when corporations and other entities are starting yet more volunteerism campaigns, at a time when volunteers are being expected to increase their efforts to fill gaps in human services happening because of budget cuts, this is distressing, disturbing news. To meet those government and corporate calls for more volunteers, experts are needed who are knowledgeable and experienced regarding effective volunteer engagement. Volunteers must be effectively supported in order for their efforts to be successful – their success doesn’t happen because of luck or a lot of good intentions. Without a strong, adequately-funded institution to track volunteerism and support those working with volunteers, volunteerism in England will not reach its potential.

Volunteering England will be looking into ways to diversify its sources of funding so that further cuts aren’t necessary and to better ensure the continuation of the organization and its very important work. I wish this vital organization the very best of luck.