Working with Volunteers

• Having a volunteer coordinator is very valuable

  • Managing the influx of people who want to be volunteering

  • Managing events depending on the scope and scale of the event

• Underneath this desire to volunteer and get involved is a desire to be seen and connected to the community, so have a human answer them directly.

• Make sure their not fishing for access to medicine as opposed to growing the community

• Volunteer postings, very specific, like job postings, this way we found people would be much more willing to commit to one particular thing. This ends up being a metric for how mature your organization is when you're able to demonstrate what exactly you need and two you're gonna have people that continue to show up. If you're tracking how many people are showing up, and then you can promote them.

  • Can you be here for 1 hour doing this one thing

• Volunteers love swag, they get a t-shirt if they helped with an event for example, and thats great advertisement

• Be intentional about creating a volunteer application

  • Ask people to share what their expertise are

  • In lieu of a network of advisors you can have a network of volunteers for people to offer their expertise

• Can be a great starting point for committees

• Get a publicity statement ready for volunteers, they might be featured in media for example

• LLCs cannot have a volunteer