Single Day of Service

[Spaceman3750]

I learned something interesting at an ARC committee meeting the other night. Right now the "single biggest trend in volunteering" is "single day of service". Basically, the concept is that someone might only have one day, or four hours, or whatever to spend, but they want to use it doing something meaningful so they volunteer somewhere for those few hours. They don't have a long term commitment, but instead they simply help out with things that need done.

Right now, CAP simply isn't set up for this type of volunteerism. However, I can't help to think that we would somehow accomplish more if we were able to harness these single-day volunteers to take care of small things so that our "full-time" volunteers can handle bigger issues.

Thoughts?

[davidsinn]

I learned something interesting at an ARC committee meeting the other night. Right now the "single biggest trend in volunteering" is "single day of service". Basically, the concept is that someone might only have one day, or four hours, or whatever to spend, but they want to use it doing something meaningful so they volunteer somewhere for those few hours. They don't have a long term commitment, but instead they simply help out with things that need done.

Right now, CAP simply isn't set up for this type of volunteerism. However, I can't help to think that we would somehow accomplish more if we were able to harness these single-day volunteers to take care of small things so that our "full-time" volunteers can handle bigger issues.

Thoughts?

Not worth the hassle. If there are any cadets present at all you would have to babysit each and everyone of these "volunteers." If someone is truly service minded they would be in it for the long haul. If they only want to do something for a day go volunteer at a soup kitchen or something along those lines. Our stuff is too specialized for the most part to be able to deal with a bunch of well meaning yet untrained people.

[Pylon]

I completely disagree with davidsinn.  CAP can be equipped to take advantage of these types of opportunities.  My squadron has taken advantage of this trend.  Specific universities near us organize annual campus-wide days of service for incoming freshmen and/or the whole university.  Non-profits sign up to participate and based on the workload they have, the school will send a certain sized group of eager college students to help for that day.  We've used them to get a lot of facilities work done: cleaning up around our CAP buildings at the airport; moving furniture; cleaning up in the hangar; sorting through the junk in our storage building; and one particularly big project: organizing and inventorying uniforms and accessories.   We did all of these service projects on a day that was convenient for the group (so not a meeting night; no cadets around so no supervision issues).

But if you have groups nearby that are interested in single-day service projects, there are lots of things you can do with them.  Besides what we did, with cleaning & organizing our facilities, and sorting/organizing/inventorying uniforms and supplies, you could also use one-day volunteers to make signs for your squadron; post recruiting flyers & materials all around town; scour the web for directories and listings and calendars your squadron could be added to; search for current aerospace news, print neat stories and photos, and update your AE bulletein board; ad nauseum.

The added benefit (besides getting some projects tackled that may normally always remain on your "Nice to do someday" list) is that you can leave all of these volunteers with recruiting information and give them a spiel about joining CAP before they go home.  At the very least, you got extra work done for your squadron and you made a whole bunch of people in your community more aware of Civil Air Patrol and who we are.

[Ed Bos]

I think the right thing to do would be to engage folks and have projects for them to do. Things like volunteering to clean up the grounds and landscaping of a municipal airport or senior center, repainting a squadron building or hanger, etc... Things that aren't a primary function or support area of CAP, but events a squadron could use to engage their local community and maybe teach these single-day volunteers a little about CAP and what it really does.

The only "hassle" would be trying to teach folks how to organize a squadron's personnel files or the other drudgery that units and headquarters staffs have to do but would love to palm off on others. That sort of thing would be totally inappropriate for this sort of scenario, I think.

The most important things for this sort of project would be 1) picking a quality project that unit members and new volunteers would find worthwhile, and 2) getting the word out as much as possible to engage lots of community members for maximum participation.

[Eclipse]

No thank you.

This is just another way to provide people with a "feel good" without their actually having to commit to something.

The kind of make-work stuff that non-members would be allowed to perform should already be getting accomplished by the membership.  This is the
volunteer equivalence of outsourcing.

And that doesn't even address the myriad issues of liability, CPT, and image that are involved with something like this.

[Pylon]

The kind of make-work stuff that non-members would be allowed to perform should already be getting accomplished by the membership.  This is the
volunteer equivalence of outsourcing.

And if I have commitment, talented volunteers like pilots, military personnel, teachers, and professionals doing great work in their respective functional areas for the squadron -- why wouldn't I want to outsource time-consuming, unskilled tasks like groundswork, building maintenance, or sorting piles of clothes to an outside group of willing people?

"Hey, we're willing to bring 30 people and put that much needed coat of paint on your building if you want?"   
"No, you kids stay away from my lawn! We don't need you help!  We're above that!"

Really?

[Eclipse]

Really.

If they want to help, they should join.  We're not scaled or insured to be taking on non-member volunteers, and this kind of thing tends to scope-creep quickly.

"Why should I bother paying for a membership, uniform, and having to show up all the time, when I can just do the same stuff for free and come and go as I please?"

[RiverAux]

CAP represents that absolute hardest type of organization to get people to volunteer for (at least in my opinion) so we are definitely bucking the trend towards short-term volunteering. 

Can we make use of these folks?  Pylon has presented a few options, but the sort of activities he describes are relatively rare.  Frankly, I wouldn't be all that excited about having outsiders messing around with CAP supplies or equipment.

I would want to see some concrete direction from national on the status of such volunteers in terms of liability for injuries, etc.  I'm generally not one to worry much about that, but if CAP is specifically requesting people to do things for us at our locations, we should be sure that CAP is ready to assume the responsibilities that go along with that. 

[RRLE]

The USCG Aux has been thinking about the same issue for years. The concept is also known as espisodic volunteering The Aux thinks or thought it could make use of episodic volunteers but has never figured out how. The Aux has the same problem as CAP, for almost any mission or program a qualification is required. The Aux also requires a background and fingerprint check for its volunteers. That pretty much rules out using any 'unchecked' volunteer from touching any member or mission paperwork.

Some more references on the subject:

IJOVA Episodic Volunteering Volume XXV, No. 3

Episodic Volunteering

[RRLE]

Here is the August 2006 report where the USCG Auxiliary discussed the issues in this thread. And nothing was done to change the Aux's recruitment methods. The Aux had slight gains in membership for a few years after the report was issued but they have had declines for the last year or so.

Can the U.S. Coast Guard Auxiliary survive in the 21st Century?: How changing generational attitudes will affect an all-volunteer organization

[RiverAux]

To put that into perspective, the decline RRLE refers to is a whopping 1% decline in membership in 2011 after about 3-4 years of increases. 

[♠SARKID♠]

Really.

If they want to help, they should join.  We're not scaled or insured to be taking on non-member volunteers, and this kind of thing tends to scope-creep quickly.

"Why should I bother paying for a membership, uniform, and having to show up all the time, when I can just do the same stuff for free and come and go as I please?"

+1

[RRLE]

To put that into perspective, the decline RRLE refers to is a whopping 1% decline in membership in 2011 after about 3-4 years of increases.

The increases were about as whooping. The latest decrease put the Aux membership to below what it was in 2009. The major membership decline that is mentioned in the report in the period 2003-2006 put the Auxiliary membership back to what it was in the late 1960s to early 1970s, before the last build-up. So about 40 years of membership growth disappeard in a brief 3 year period.

The average annual growth in Aux membership from 1997-2001 was 3.7%. Since 2007, the Aux in its best years has had aabout a 2% growth. The decline, by the way was closer to 1.8% then 1%. And as stated, the one year decline wiped  out the preceding 2 years of (declining) growth.

But the issue isn't the Aux and its travails. The issue is the Aux, on an official level, at least recognized the problem of changing attitudes toward volunteering. The second issue is that it hasn't been able to develop a strategy to deal with the change. The nature of the Aux's and maybe CAP's missions make it very difficult to use episodic volunteers. The credentialing/qualification scheme works against it. As will the attitude of the membership who, as they used to say in the Aux, had to 'drop trou and grab ankles' to get background checked be toward the episodic volunteers who would not have to have anything checked to perform the same missions.