Volunteering & Volunteer Students

Yesterday was my first Saturday working at the library and I took advantage of the quiet morning in my shared office to work on my volunteer program.  I have had some interest in volunteering from teens–five have filled out applications so far and are scheduled to come in next week.  They’ll keep track of their time and the jobs they’ve completed on a time sheet.  This will help me keep track of what they’ve done in case they ever want me to give them a reference or recommendation and for my monthly and annual department reports for the Library Board.

After working up the time sheets, I spent some time reading through the PUBYAC archives on volunteer programs to help me think through some of the issues I might face.  My manager brought up to me early on in our discussions about volunteering that I might want to consider setting a limit on how often teens are allowed to volunteer.  This same topic came up on PUBYAC and I have definitely talked to a couple of eager teens who I think would like me to keep them busy 20 hours a week or more!  Clearly I can’t be spending my entire day at work supervising volunteers and finding work for them to do so for the time being I have set the weekly limit to 3 hours per week.

The other trick to the volunteer program is giving the teens something that doesn’t create more work for the librarians and staff AND giving them something that is actually interesting to them.  I am striking a balance by having each teen volunteer spend 10-15 minutes of their shift on grunt work (e.g. cleaning tables, dusting shelves, pictures, computer screens, cleaning board books, etc.) and then they can do something more interesting like help patrons with the self-check-out stations, work on book displays or reviews, organize the manga series, etc.  I created a chart for the grunt work so that I can keep track of the last date that each task was completed.  The teens will be allowed to pick what they want to do from the grunt list as long as it hasn’t been done in the last week or so.  I think this is a good solution so that the really boring stuff is spread out between all the volunteers.

I other “policies,” I have decided to continue with a policy used previously at my library with teen volunteers.  There is a “3 strikes” policy for the program.  If volunteers are a no-show or are reprimanded 3 times, they will no longer be allowed to volunteer.  I think this helps in teaching them responsibility.  Particularly for those who haven’t had a job, I think it’s good to get them thinking about what it’s like to have someone depending on you and that it’s common courtesy to call if you can’t make it in, etc.

I’ll have my first volunteer Monday morning at 9:30 a.m. and she’s an eager beaver, so we’ll see how it goes!