Volunteer Demo

Demonstration of Volunteer Committment

Purpose

The purpose of this wiki is to show a more holistic interpretation to volunteering in terms of people's needs and contraints.

In addition to this diagram, each person should indicate their short-term and long-term goals and needs for volunteering. This will create a database or resource to help analyse and match-up work, etc. By being transparent, these resources would provide clear, current, and relevant measurement of volunteer contribution (for load-sharing).

In my opinion, the church can't thrive without this type of resource to allow the congregation full access to "bust myths", misconceptions or wrong assumptions. I believe that, instead of delicately tip-toeing around the subject, the facts should be laid-out for everyone to see. A "reality-check" of a stewardship campaign so to speak
(or "tough love" if I may be too bold!).

Areas Where Murray Saul is Struggling

As for myself, I am still wrestling with providing fee-based courses at Westminster due to cost/benefit analysis. Curriculum design is an IMMENSE time-related activity. I am literally "straddling the fence" wondering whether or not to risk the huge amounts of time and effort in developing curriculum (especially if there are not sufficient and continued enrolment of students to pay as a return on my time investment). Remember: teaching part-time at other community colleges are more convenient for the instructor since the curriculum has already been developed and colleges have their own marketing department to bring in the students. As a rule of thumb (or teacher joke), the teacher instructing a new course only makes $0.17 / hour. Developing a curriculum drops that wage rate down to $0.01 / hour, and the teacher worries about the return on their investment.

Another labour-intensive endeavour is technical documentation. For example, here is a WIKI that I have been authoring for quite some time to provide technical details for the setup of the computer lab (it is still incomplete): [ http://zenit.senecac.on.ca/wiki/index.php/Computer_Lab_Manual ]

I could easily see myself absorbed in this documentation indefinitely (not to mention documentation for training staff), and thus the need for volunteers to allow me to focus on this activity. This is why I feel that I simply don't have any time to volunteer for "other things" like ushering or coffee-time. I like this to be an informational resource that someone could view first, prior to asking... I don't know if it relates to other people, but anything technical requires a huge investing in time and energy, and is not measured in any quantifiable terms (unless documenting it). People don't see me "working the problem" for hours-and-hours on Friday and Saturday nights. Since they don't see it, they assume I am very productive at it, which is a misleading assumption...

Mind Map Of Murray's Volunteer Work vs. Spare Time Activities

Murray Saul's Voluntary Duties and Spare Time Proposed Activities