Whenever I read in the news that Canadians are volunteering less every year, I grumble at the screen because I know exactly why. Having volunteered on and off and attempted different volunteering opportunities for more than two decades now, I’ve become something of a volunteer onboarding expert and worst-practices detector.
Please don’t mistake me for a particularly good or altruistic person: if you immigrate to Canada as a young adult on your own, as I did, expect the integration to Canadian society to be a lifelong stop-and-restart project, and that is what I’ve been doing. We volunteer to share our skills as much as to belong somewhere, find our people.
The longest volunteer role I’ve ever had was with a large agency that matches potentially troubled or school challenged kids with a suitable adult mentor. You are tasked with not exactly being an auntie or a family friend, but a mix of educator, life coach and a benevolent adult presence in the tween’s life on a fairly firm schedule (say, four hours every couple of weeks, or two every week). Those were terrific three years, though not easy at all, and requiring a lot of activity planning. What added to the challenge, though, was the staff turnover at the agency. Our main supervisor changed twice due to people moving on, and we did our graduation interview with a completely unknown staffer. Too, near the end, the mentors were starting to be invited to fundraising activities for the agency, which I thought was a bit greedy. And so we learn the first lesson: do not rewrite a well-defined volunteer role, which required highly specific training, as something else. Don’t ask longtime volunteers to also fundraise, unless they’re your board members.
Another thing struck me as unusual: save for the occasional professional development gathering at the agency, none of the mentors met any of the other mentors, and same went for the kids. In other words, there was no volunteer appreciation social at a large budget agency whose existence hinges on scores of seriously committed volunteers.
This was a feature, it turns out, not a bug, with many other organizations. Back in my thirties I joined the volunteer pool of one of the many meal-delivery charities — a couple of us were cyclists on wheels — and I barely ever met anyone else who volunteered there. More importantly, a few months in you realize that you are only marginally improving an elderly or disabled person’s nutrition, and doing not much effective long-term at all. Meals were modest (the menus definitely needed a Joshna Maharaj) and covered one per day, for as many days a week as the client could afford.
When the effects appear short term and cosmetic, you will lose volunteers. But I get it, there needs to be a greater level of social trust for a group of people to get together and occasionally cook meals for the seniors or disabled strangers in their vicinity — say, in the same building or on the same street. Until then, there’ll only be temporary relief.
An agency near the city core that specializes in making available fresh produce boxes to local residents on a certain day of the week, also had me as a volunteer. The job was physical, which I liked: pack similar combinations of fruit and veg and sometimes dairy into many, many boxes. I did not last, due to the unlucky shift timing. My shift ran over lunch hour into the early afternoon, and I came home starved. Lesson: if you’re asking people to deal with food and your shift is around universally agreed meal time, feed your volunteers. Not even tea or fruit snacks? They won’t stay for long, that much I know.
In many respects, COVID and the lockdowns further diminished the in-person, social aspect of volunteering, especially the more white-collar kind. Everything moved online and then stayed online even when this was not necessary. For a good part of 2022 I volunteered for a major adult literacy organization as an instructor, and all the activities were held online: training, onboarding, instruction, all of the communication. I’ve never met a single person and my offers to organize the in-person instruction in some form were not taken up. Just last year, I checked back with them to see if the in-person instruction was an option. Only on Thursday, I was told, during work hours. The rest of it is still online only.
Though it could have been worse. More than a decade ago I applied to volunteer for a west-end adult literacy organization. Sure, they said, after you complete this two-day anti-oppression training, full day Friday and Saturday. I was younger and foolish and indeed did attend the Saturday part, but did not continue. It presumed that volunteers need to be purified before any amount of reading could take place. I felt bad for wanting to volunteer in this particular way, started questioning my motives.
The most obvious lesson of all: don’t hate your volunteers.
The police checks are of course mandatory in volunteering with vulnerable populations and that is fine. But in the online application for a Vulnerable Sector Check (VSC) you will now encounter a cuckoo’s egg: credit checks. When two of the organizations I mentioned above asked me either to renew or do a VSC, the company contracted by the police services to handle the applicants also wanted access to my credit records. When I asked the volunteer co-ordinators to tell me more about the reasons for this, they could only shrug their shoulders.
But I’m leaving the best for last. People visiting large museums — multimillion- dollar budget institutions — are probably unaware that most of the public-facing roles are performed by volunteers. The ROM, for example, has a Department of Museum Volunteers and so many unpaid jobs assigned to trained volunteers that they could form a parallel organization. When I went through the training process years ago, it was required of potential volunteers to buy an annual membership before they could join the department, therefore effectively asking them to pay the ROM to let them volunteer. (The ROM says the department has more than 400 members; the museum’s website says the department requires a membership.)
On a more serious note, many of the unpaid jobs here are — or would be, in ordinary circumstances — highly skilled, and deserving of remuneration. Does a major North American museum really want unpaid docents to represent the knowledge of the institution — and Ontario, before visitors from around the world? Apparently, yes. I haven’t taken any of the volunteer-run tours at either the ROM or the Gardiner, but I did talk a ROMWalk or three and they had a make-do, community feel. Salaries at the ROM, meanwhile, are outstanding in comparison to everywhere else in the arts sector.
Lesson: do not exploit enthusiastic people under the guise of volunteering if you are one of the major players in this country’s culture. Create part-time jobs instead.
To recap. Don’t suddenly reinvent the role a volunteer has been performing successfully. Allow volunteers some room for input in what concerns them. Create social opportunities for volunteers. This is why the most lasting volunteering is with organizations like choirs, amateur musicianship groups, the Women’s Institutes, garden clubs and church groups: volunteers are asked to take part in decision-making, not only execute someone else’s. Don’t kill your volunteer onboarding with bureaucracy. Don’t suspect nefarious motives in someone who would like to share their love of reading with another adult. And if your job is food, for crying out loud, don’t send volunteers home hungry after their shift. And you’ll see us again, and again, and we’ll last longer than even your staff.
Lydia Perovic is a culture writer and author in Toronto. Find her recent writing in The Hub, the Wholenote magazine, or her own Substack, Long Play.
