Volunteers Required!!
30 Apr 2010 3 Comments
in Family Tags: Galatians, school p&c, soccer, volunteering
When someone needs some help do you volunteer? Or are you the person who sits on their hands in the meeting while positions are being filled?
I am a volunteer. Maybe sometimes a professional volunteer. I am involved in too many things and I over commit myself regularly.
I often ask myself – why do I volunteer to do these things? Is it being selfless or selfish? And a lot of the time I know that it a purely selfish thing that I am doing.
What do I do? Well, at the moment I am an age co-ordinator for my sons’ soccer club and I am vice president of the school p&c. When time permits, I help out at my church op shop and normally offer my services at fundraising BBQs. I have also been known to help out in the soccer canteen. Last year, in addition to the 2 official jobs I still hold, I was also school board chair and manager of one of my sons soccer teams. In the past I have been a treasurer for several organisations and also an active member of a service club. Some years I have BBQed more sausages than I could even start to count.
Apart from being treasurer, which I have decided to never ever do again purely because I don’t want to be doing the job I get paid for as a volunteer as I just can’t deal with more accounting when I get home, I enjoy the jobs I have done. Co-ordinating the soccer age group means that I ensure that my son is in a team I am happy with. It also appeals to my sense of organisation, something I struggle with at home and work, but am very good at doing with a spreadsheet of names.
Through volunteering I have met some amazing people. As a member of Apex I made some wonderful friends and did some things I never dreamt of doing – cooking a fried egg, staying up all night in a caravan on the highway cooking sausages, serving breakfast on the lawns of parliament house. The p&c at school has provided me with a lovely network of friends and also I can physically see some of the things I have achieved – like the school bubbler paid with from the proceeds of many BBQs I have worked at, literacy resources that my kids use regularly at school and a sign out the front that is no longer needed but one that we worked hard to buy.
What frustrates me about volunteering? The lack of other people who are prepared to put their hand up and be involved. Co-ordinating soccer required me to find a coach for each team, a parent who was willing to give up a few hours a week to participate with their child and their friends in sport. With 100 kids in the age group, one would think this would not be difficult. Definitely not the case! I ended up with 2 teams without coaches. For one team I coerced a young man I know into doing the job, and in the other eventually managed to guilt a parent into doing it. For years the school p&c struggled to find other parents to help at BBQs, attend meetings or even attend school functions that involved their kids. And as for Apex, well that is a declining group – there are a lot of people who are just not prepared to give up their time to help others.
Has the world become a more self obsessed place? Is there an expectation that someone else will do it, so I don’t need to bother?
Recently at Bible Study we were discussing fruit of the spirit from Galatians 5:22-23. The focus that week was on joy. We discussed the joy in giving and the joy in helping others – this is what volunteering gives me. Helping other people fills you with the most wonderful feeling. Volunteering for me is part of my christian walk – helping others who can’t help themselves – and I get to revel in the feeling of joy.
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