Tuesday, April 25, 2006

Volunteers

Volunteers

<rant>

S and I volunteer with our church, youth organizations and others.  As a matter of fact, we organize some of our home setup around that work – we have a home office not to work at home from our jobs but to support our volunteer work this is a large portion of our lives. We’re both very busy but would miss this work if we couldn’t do it.

That makes working with other volunteers difficult some times, we’re both dedicated to the organizations that we work with but I find it frustrating sometimes working with others in our organizations. I hear complaints that communication in a volunteer organization isn’t working but then they aren’t attending the meetings that are being held.

Sigh…

One other observation, much of the communications that we do between volunteers is by email and I have run into people that ‘just don’t have email’ which is ok, but I’ve also run into people that don’t have email and throw that back at you as a challenge. They’re almost proud of it…?  Now, readers that aren’t in Canada should understand that 70%+ of Canadians have access to email either at home or at work and that percentage continues to grow every year.

I wonder if people that are not on email understand – I can send an email to five people at once, rather than making five phone calls over the course of two days, leaving messages, getting call backs etc. With services like GMail with its excellent conversation tracking it’s even easy to track multiple conversations over several days.

Double Sigh…

Ev

</rant>

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