New Job

I have a new job. Well, it's not so new anymore, I guess. I've been there maybe a month. I am the Volunteer Coordinator (part-time) at the local affiliate of Habitat for Humanity. This has largely involved sending out mass emails to people who might be interested in builds and sorting through a stack of applications. I got the job mostly for my computer skills, but it's the people skills I'm using. My interview process is apparently really easy: "You want to work here for free? You're in!" I try not to make any permanent schedule changes until I know someone wants to stay with us. I can usually count on the kids doing community service to show up, at least. For everyone's information: in Ontario, high school students have to do 40 hours community service in order to graduate. So those kids usually stay. The co-op students are reliable too. We have this one kid - I don't know what we're going to do without him when he's gone. He's just fantastic.

But I've had a couple people that I thought would be reliable just randomly not show up. Which has happened to me with breakfast at the school, too. We use proper dishes now and we make toast every day, so we need 4 people to be there in the morning. We have all our volunteers from the JK-3 holding school AND the volunteers from the 4-8 holding school to draw on. It was chaotic when we all just showed up whenever, so I wrote a schedule. Luckily, no-one seems to mind that I did that. I have no desire to be in charge of anything, but if we'd continued on as we were, we'd have been bleeding volunteers and I just can't come in every day.

Right, so the point is that one of our people has been not showing up. It bugs me because she has my phone number and just lives down the street. I'd hate to have to go all hardass on her, but hey - I gotta know if you're coming in. If not, I can find someone else. Or, actually, I've asked people to trade rather than get me to find someone. I'm not in charge.

But here's the thing - now that I've looked into some of the resources for Volunteer Coordinators that we have at work, I'm thinking I could do some stuff at the school. We need people to do all kinds of things. There are only so many regular, reliable people to work with, and now I'm not free Monday - Thursday between 9 and 1, which is inconvenient for things like class trips (I had to turn down a field trip last week) and head checks. We really need to put out a Call for Volunteers. Maybe if we had application forms at the front office... It's weird - I bet if I made people fill out forms, they'd love to come in and help, but just ask them to show up and they won't. It would all be so easy with proper organisation...

Make me stop.