Your Volunteer Budget

As we begin to go forward politically this year, I thought it would be useful to talk a little about volunteer budgets. Some of us, namely me, are hoping that we can help individuals within the club and our community find ways to be more active politically. But from my experience I know that there is a place you can get to where you find that you've just taken on too much, and if you do not cut something out of your schedule your head might actually explode. So, with this in mind, let's talk about volunteering.

The first thing I always ask myself is: can I actually do the thing I'm being asked to do? Some people just don't like calling voters, or knocking on doors, but are more than happy filing in a campaign office. Don't try to do things that you find boring or otherwise undesirable. From another perspective, assess what you like to do and then see if there's an activity within the club that calls for that skill. If you do what you like to do, and have fun doing it, your work will have a higher quality output and you will be able to see the positive results over time.

The next step is to determine how much time you can actually volunteer. Think in terms no less than a week at a time, but monthly is actually better. If I can give four hours a month, then I can do an hour a week, two hours every other week, of four hours once a month. Don't try to exceed your budget until you determine that it won't detract from the other aspects of your real life.

Oh, yea, your real life. Well, first of all, your real life always comes first. The thing is to consider your real life needs and then see if there's time left over for volunteering. But, I'll bet you've got an hour here and an hour there to chip in and just haven't realized it yet. Once you start volunteering, and it becomes a normal part of your life, you'll find that volunteering is easily done and would be missed if not so.

Recently I found myself hitting the volunteer ceiling. One more thing and that's it, I quit. Well, we just have to take a step back and reconfigure. Sometimes I notice that I just haven't designed that way that my various volunteer jobs fit together. Often a single task goes in many directions and the work can be consolidated once discovered. Too confusing? Look for duplications in your work and streamline the process in order to have less actual work to do. Ok.

This post isn't meant to be a text book on this subject, but instead to open the discussion. I'll bring this topic back every so many months and together we can discover more.

Mark