At re-Cycles we decided since (at the time) all of our labour was volunteer that we should only consider paying wages for a service that we we unable to accomplish with volunteer labour. So far we have applied this to 4 services.
 
1) Day to day contact with other organizations and media which tends to occur during 9-5 weekdays. Most of our senior volunteer resources have full time jobs which make them unavailable weekdays.
 
2) We needed to find a new shop location, move and incorporate. Arranging all that was a significant effort that needed corrdinating and was beyond the amount of time of any of our senior volunteers was able to donate.
 
3) Corrdinating the day-to-day running of the organization and doing all the stuff that no volunteers offered to do in a timely manner. Again a significant effort that needed corrdinating and was beyond the amount of time of any of our senior volunteers was able to donate.
 
4) Extending our hours to days and weekends. We were getting overwhelmed on the evenings we were open as well as getting many requests to be open outside of our evening hours. We knew from past experience we did not have any senior volunteers available/willing to work days or weekends so we decided to offer some paid hours.
 
Services 1-3 ended up being combied into a Director's Honararium allowing Mark to dedicate the hours required to accomplish those tasks. The need for service 4 is reviewed twice a year. Thus far no volunteers have come forward to work those shifts and the work accomplished has relieved some of the pressure from the evening shifts while also proving to be revenue positive (after paying the wages).

Chris Wells
(Email Handler & one of many Volunteer Head Mechanics)

re-Cycles Bicycle Co-op
473 Bronson Ave. Ottawa
info@re-cycles.ca
http://www.re-cycles.ca/

--- On Sun, 4/11/10, Ainsley Naylor <needleandthread@gmail.com> wrote:

From: Ainsley Naylor <needleandthread@gmail.com>
Subject: [TheThinkTank] Suggestions for paid work
To: thethinktank@bikecollectives.org
Date: Sunday, April 11, 2010, 10:55 AM

Hey folks
We have been avoiding the very loaded *paid position* conversation for about 2 years here at Pirates. As we are getting even busier than every before, and making more than enough money to cover our operation costs, I think it is time to start hashing out various ideas for ways to pay for certain tasks to be done.

I don't think we are in the market to have a paid coordinator or shop manager, as it would be too likely to lead to authoritarian issues and would take up too much of our extra cash. Do folks have suggestions or examples of small-scale employment or honorarium models that have worked for them?

To give you a guideline let's talk about paying out less than $600 a month.

thanks!
ainsley.

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