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FCC fair hopes
to recruit volunteers
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| Elaine Comegys, left,
Ona Harshaw and Janette Reedy sit in the greenhouse at the Friends
Care Center, where they are hosting a volunteer fair this Saturday.
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I’ll volunteer when I become an adult and have
children. I’ll volunteer when my kids start school. I’ll volunteer
when I retire and have time on my hands. I’ll volunteer when…
Everyone knows that volunteering is an important
part of how Yellow Springs functions. But many may not know that the current
local volunteer pool is aging, and because of their increasingly busy lives
or perhaps because of the variety of entertainment choices, fewer younger
people are stepping in to take their place, said Elaine Comegys during an
interview last Friday.
And as volunteerism drops off around the nation,
local volunteer-dependent organizations are also in need of people willing
to donate any amount of time at all, be it from 20 hours a week to one hour
a month.
Comegys and local residents Janette Reedy and Judith
Schimpf are using National Volunteer Week from April 18–24 to recognize
and recruit volunteers at a volunteer fair this Saturday, April 17, from
2–4 p.m. at the Friends Care Center. The fair is the trio’s
final project for the Yellow Springs Leadership Institute, a local nonprofit
organization in its second year of teaching people to become effective community
stewards.
The event, located in the south lounge of the FCC’s
main building, will feature representatives from the Yellow Springs Senior
Center, the AACW Blues Fest, Glen Helen, the High School Gardeners (CSA),
Miami Township Fire-Rescue, channel 13 and the Friends Care Center. The
seven groups make up a small cross section of the countless organizations
in town who rely on volunteers for their services.
Yellow Springs already benefits from a large pool
of civic-minded residents who give invaluable time and service to the organizations
they believe in, Reedy said. According to Village records, nearly 100 people
from the community serve on administrative and interest group boards to
support Village Council alone.
Though demographic information on local volunteers
is difficult to calculate, Leadership Institute student Corinne Pelzl recorded
a total of at least 120 organizations in the village that rely on or are
completely run by volunteers. Comegys and Reedy hope the fair serves to
heighten people’s sense of responsibility for the organizations that
make the village a desirable place to live.
“I really don’t think people are aware
that so many organizations in town are reliant on the support of volunteers,”
Comegys said. “We think things will just keep on functioning all by
themselves the way they always have.”
There are so many organizations in town with so
many needs that no matter what a person’s expertise or interest is,
one of them will be a good match. Volunteers find satisfaction in their
participation because they can share something they like and are good at
with others, Reedy and Comegys both agreed.
“If people can find their niche, volunteering
can be very rewarding,” Comegys said. “You get a better sense
of your strengths and weaknesses and you improve your self-knowledge.”
And people don’t need a lot of spare time
to be a valuable volunteer, Comegys said.
“Going to talk to someone for an hour at the
Friends Care Center can make a tremendous difference,” Comegys said.
“We always wait until we have a big chunk of time to do something,
but it’s possible to be helpful with very little time,” Comegys
said.
Effective volunteers need to strike a balance between
serving the organization’s needs and initiating work for themselves
when staff and mentors are too busy to direct the work, Comegys said. Volunteering
is not “about taking control of the organization,” she said,
but about recognizing a need within the purview of the group’s mission
and addressing it.
An estimated 150 people volunteer at the Glen each
year to serve on boards, lead special talks and hikes, work at Trailside
Museum and the nature shop and to help with land management and mailings,
the Glen’s volunteer coordinator Beth Krisko said. With just nine
full- and part-time staff members to manage 1,000 acres and the Glen’s
educational programs, self-driven volunteers are prized.
“Volunteers are the backbone of this organization,”
Krisko said. “But retention is difficult because there is not a large
staff and a lot of things need to be unsupervised and self-directed.”
It helps if volunteers arrive with an idea of what
they want to do and are excited about it, she said. Volunteers can donate
as much time as they want from working three hours a week in the nature
shop to four hours a year for a mailing. The Glen is also open to new ideas,
such as the mural one volunteer is painting.
As with many organizations, most of the Glen’s
core group of volunteers are around 70 years old. The Glen is looking for
the next wave of people at retirement age and younger, some of whom can
be available during the day to answer phones and welcome visitors and others
who can clear trails and help with physical labor, Krisko said.
The public is invited to an open house on April
17, the afternoon of the volunteer fair, at Trailside Museum on Corry Street,
where people can find out about the needs of the nature preserve and talk
to other Glen volunteers.
Rodney Bean, director of the Yellow Springs Senior
Center, has noted similar trends with his volunteers. The average age of
the current volunteers is over 60, and convincing them to take leadership
responsibilities is difficult because it reminds them too much of being
at work, he said.
The number of volunteers at the senior center has
risen to about 80, which is good for the center, Bean said. But the number
of different things each volunteer is involved with has decreased, which
puts stress on the center’s 2.5 full-time equivalents to direct them.
Volunteers need to be reminded that they are not only helping serve the
organization but they are helping serve those the organization serves, he
said.
Bean also recognizes the senior center is fortunate
to have so many excellent volunteers who are committed to the organization.
Volunteers do everything from driving the senior center van and running
the front desk to doing fundraising and recruiting new membership. But because
the center continues to serve a larger population of elders, new volunteers
are always needed.
Fair organizers are concerned that by the time people
realize that the work of volunteers drives so many of the valued services
in town, it will be too late. They are hoping that Saturday’s fair
and other recruiting activities will remind people that the village functions
like a family and that each member needs to take responsibility for the
needs of the whole.
—Lauren Heaton |
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