Re: [TheThinkTank] Volunteers vs. Paid Staff

-- Sincerely, Jonathan Morrison Executive Director Salt Lake City Bicycle Collective 2312 S. West Temple Salt Lake City, UT 84115 w: 801-328-2453 c: 801-688-0183 f: 801-466-3856 www.slcbikecollective.org Get Addicted to Crank! http://www.slcbikecollective.org/crank/ The mission of the Salt Lake City Bicycle Collective is to promote cycling as an effective and sustainable form of transportation and as a cornerstone of a cleaner, healthier, and safer society. The Bicycle Collective provides refurbished bicycles and educational programs to the community, focusing on children and lower income households. On Mon, Jun 23, 2008 at 9:22 AM, Macho Philipovich macho@resist.ca wrote: > > Hey everyone. We're trying to sort through a couple of issues at the shop > right now, and I'd like to see if any others have experiences with similar > situations that they could share. > > 1. We like to keep as many open shop hours as our volunteer capacity will > allow, which doesn't leave much left for running other programs. Our shop > is located in a poor part of town, and we're finding a lot of schools, > community centres, and immigrant organizations are asking us to run > workshops for kids. The said community organizations, though, are often > willing to provide honoraria for this work. In the past we've just had the > money donated back to the bike project, but now people who run the programs > are starting to keep it for themselves, and we're kind of feeling torn. On > the one hand, partnering with community organizations so that kids can have > access to bikes and bike repair tools & skills is amazing, and is basically > why we exist, and giving our volunteers, most of whom are low-income, some > monetary compensation is great, especially since we are a very financially > stable shop. On the other hand, there is also the concern that if > volunteers start to be paid, it will take them away from our open shop > hours, and leave other volunteers to do essentially the same work, only > without getting paid. This could seemingly cause resentment, hard feelings, > and the general deterioration of our shop. We're not, at this time, able to > or interested in paying all volunteer mechanics all of the time. So this is > something we have to find a way to reasonably resolve. > > > > Has anyone experienced either of these things in their shop? Any thoughts? > Solutions? > > Thanks, > Macho of the Bike Dump > http://bike-dump.ca > > _______________________________________________ > Thethinktank mailing list > Thethinktank@bikecollectives.org > > http://lists.bikecollectives.org/listinfo.cgi/thethinktank-bikecollectives.o... >