We’ve tried comping volunteers dances or reducing their fee. Since we switched to a sliding scale and never turn people away who can’t afford anything at all, we decided to simply tell volunteers to use that to their advantage and pick their own entry fee. They seem to like being comped however we do it, but the sliding scale system is better than trying to decide which evening the door sitter(s) get comped.

No one has ever complained of being undervalued or overworked. Indeed our opposite problem is (rarely) sometimes we get too many volunteers and that makes our call for help seem like a sham. I try to discourage people from just showing up to help; I prefer people answer my call for help in advance. This also helps us gauge if we need to look more urgently for help at the last minute. We maintain a separate mailing list for volunteers so we aren’t annoying the larger dance community with extra emails.

\Bob Peterson

Boston Gender Free Contra Dancers

he/him

On Jul 15, 2020, at 19:48, Karey Bacon via Organizers <organizers@lists.sharedweight.net> wrote:

Hi Organizers,

We in Philadelphia are working through some dissatisfaction with how we compensate our volunteers. We have the question on the table of compensation vs. recognition.

We are a little bit stuck, so I'm looking for other ideas to get us out of our stuckness, to see if there's something that's working really well.

A core issue with the dissatisfaction is a feeling that callers are valued more than other kinds of less-public but still-essential volunteers.

I'm looking forward to hearing how it works in your communities. (Or if this has been covered before ad nauseam, please feel free to reach out to me off-list and tell me how to search the archives, thanks.)

Thanks,
Karey Bacon
she/her/hers
267-437-5641

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