I’m retired and occasionally bored. My search for temp or part time work has hit a wall - I’m pretty sure it’s because of my age. So I thought I’d volunteer at the local marine museum.
Except you can’t be a volunteer unless you’re also a member of the museum. So, in order to give them my time, my labor, and my vast array of experience, I need to pay them?
Is this typical? Will the local Animal Welfare League ask for money before I can help them out? How about the community theater group? Will the middle school require me to belong to the PTA before I can volunteer to tutor?
I’m more than willing to give several hours a week for something that I consider important, but to pay for the privilege? That seems so wrong. Maybe I’ll just volunteer at the hospital or the veterans’ home - I think they’re happy for new faces for free.
Back when I volunteered at the aquarium I automatically received free admission at any time and free passes for family members after working a certain number of hours. Once a month the education staff, who were in charge of the volunteers, had some kind of get together for everybody, whether it was a cookout or a potluck.
I can see having to pay for your own airfare and perhaps a stipend for lodging if you were volunteering with an overseas organization, but that’s something else.
I wonder if it has to do with dwindling grant money and such. But yeah, that’s weird, especially for the hospital.
I wonder what research laboratories would be interested in the period costumes that volunteers make for the Kid’s Exploration Room at the museum? What would they buy from the person who escorts patients to the various parts of the hospital?
Honestly, from experience working in zoos, though we never did that where I worked, I could understand it. We had so many ‘volunteers’ that tried to use it as a free season ticket, or just a nice place to go mess around for several days a week without actually doing anything useful. Some volunteers were brilliant, but we did get a few terribly helpful people who would just get in the way and try to gossip to busy people.
If they’re really not short of help, it’s probably just a way to try cut out the muppets and timewasters.
I don’t think they’re worried about you selling anything.
But it does seem sort of logical to ask a volunteer to donate a little bit of money along with her time. That shows a little bit of committment from the volunteer.
It’s silly, but it’s a fact of human nature: the simple act of paying for something motivates people to want to “get their money’s worth”, and to keep a more serious attitude towards whatever it is.
for example: Say, at a shopping mall, a cub scout gives you a free cup of lemonade;-- you take it, but don’t hesitate to throw it away 3 minutes later, even without drinking it. But if you paid the scout troupe a 50 cent donation for it, you’re sure gonna drink it all.
Ha! For most of those, if you don’t have a useful qualification, be prepared to drop a couple of thousand for the opportunity to volunteer. Plus your own airfare, of course.
$15 isn’t really a lot of money. It probably barely covers the paperwork, doing a minimal background check to make sure they aren’t admitting a rapist into a building full of vulnerable people, and printing you an ID card on a lanyard. And then you might decide on day 2 that hospitals actually make you sad and you won’t come back.
I know $15 is not much, and if they’d said it was to cover the cost of your ID badge or t-shirt, I’d get it. Maybe it’s just calling it “dues” that grated on me. On the other hand, I expect there are a lot of retirees to whom $15 is a big deal.
“Yes, we’d love to have your time and talents, but you must be one of us first. Please open your wallet.”
“Sure, we’re thrilled to have you come tend to our landscaping and paint the picnic tables - so the membership fee is…”
No, I can’t think of another way to ensure the volunteers aren’t just looking to get a free pass into the museum, but it still strikes me as wrong to demand money from someone who wants to help you out. And a for-profit hospital, especially one that’s part of a rather large system (MedStar) - do they really need my $15?
There was a late night commercial on a local public access channel looking for people with private pilot licenses to volunteer their time fling organs to remote hospitals.
I was interested so I called them up. Along with my time I was told I would have to provide the plane and the gas.
So what? Serving their purposes rather than yours is the whole point of volunteering, and if it wasn’t serving their purposes to charge $15 they wouldn’t be doing it.
No, but they may need to hire someone to coordinate and train the volunteers. And even then, they need to make sure the untrained, unskilled, possibly unmotivated volunteers provide more useful work than you would get out of having the volunteer coordinator do it themselves…
I work in a research lab where we frequently get undergraduate volunteers for the summer. (Usually not even volunteers to be precise, they’ll get a stipend or credit from the university). I’ll spend weeks of my time training and supervising them – almost a full time job for the first week or two. Then, if I’m lucky, for the rest of the summer they’ll complete experiments that I could have done myself in a few weeks.
We rarely get any direct positive benefit from a single summer’s worth of work. We do it to find the most talented people who will then work in the lab for another year or two.
There’s a pretty big difference between volunteers working in a lab and volunteers sitting at the front desk in a hospital saying “The elevator is down that hall.” I doubt they train someone coming in off the street to draw blood or stitch up wounds.
As for hiring someone to train volunteers - if there were no volunteers, they’d be hiring a lot more people at a much greater expense. How many $15 dues payments would they need to cover the salary of one trainer/coordinator? I’m willing to bet they don’t get nearly enough for that.
Where I volunteer it’s not mandatory to pay the (small) fee for becoming a member of the organisation. However members receive a newsletter and an invite to the AGM. As a volunteer this will keep you in the loop as to what’s happening, useful for answering questions from the public.
I’m in the UK and I don’t think a mandatory payment would sit very well with people. Even the amount we charge would be a significant chunk of the weekly budget for a pensioner or unemployed person. Indeed our volunteers receive the perk of free tea/coffee and biscuits
OTOH, it can be a simple filter to make sure you don’t want to take the time to train volunteers for whom $15 is financial burden, as they will probably experience other “problems” over time. High-maintenance customers and workers are more trouble than they’re worth and the same is probably applicable for some volunteers.
It’s all a free market though, so if you don’t like the fee, just move on to the next organization.
