Site Coordinator's Guide Recruiting Volunteers

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Contents: What volunteers will I need for my site? Where can I find volunteers? How often should I meet with my volunteers? What if I can't find anyone in my area to help me? Avoiding Conflict 1. What volunteers will I need for my site? How many volunteers and what jobs they will do will depend greatly upon the goals you have established for your site. Basically, all sites will need at least the following volunteers in addition to the Site Coordinator in order to be successful: 1-3 Table Workers - people who will actually be at the site for 2 or more hours each to work. The longer you intend to keep your site open, the more volunteers you may want to work at the site. 1-3 Publicity/Media Relations Volunteers - see Promoting Your Site. The above is the bare-basic model of a local site or group. In theory, this model site would also consist of the Site Coordinator and two assistants. They would all 3 do the "before" work of publicity, media, site selection, and site setup. Then they would all 3 take turns working the site. Many sites in previous years have succeeded with this basic model. But, if you are fortunate enough to have a larger base of volunteers from which to draw, there is much room for expansion on this model. If you are able to draw a large enough base of support from your local community and if this meets the goals for your site, here are some other suggestions for volunteer duties: Hospitality volunteers - if your location will allow, have volunteers who will provide coffee and refreshments at your site. Have them set up extra chairs and tables for people to sit down, especially to encourage people to fill out their registration forms on the spot, but also to encourage conversations. If there are people sitting and talking at your site, it makes it warmer and more inviting, it draws more interest. People standing around the site, lined up to get their forms or just being looky-loos, will not encourage others to stop and take a look nearly as much as seeing folks sitting down to fill out paperwork or sipping coffee and sharing their story with a fellow adoptee or birthparent. Annex Site Volunteers - if you have a large enough base of support, get yourself an assistant site coordinator and split off into two sites. If your location is large enough and if those in charge or the location will allow it, why not have two sites? If a mall will let you, and you have the people power, why not a site at both ends? Or another site across town? Follow-up Volunteers - these are folks who will take the time AFTER the event is over to follow-up with people who asked for more information. Primarily, volunteers like this will come from local support groups who will have a vested interest in following up with people who expressed and interesting the support group. 2. Where can I find volunteers? The best place to find volunteers for your local site is your own backyard. Solicit support of your spouse, your children, your significant others. Even if they are not an adoptee or birthparent, they are obviously close to the issue by being close to you. By helping you with the site, they have the opportunity to remind you that they care about how adoption has affected your life. And those of you who are reunited, don't forget to get your child or birthparent involved, especially if they live close enough to your site. Being able to say "ISRR works, we are proof" is very powerful, it should not matter whether your reunion came about because of ISRR or not. Additionally, adoptees should seek the support and help of their adoptive parents. This is an invaluable asset to your group, as it is very possible to have hostile adoptive parents conform you or your group with assaulting questions and comments. Having sympathetic adoptive parents on hand to explain their point of view about adoption issues can be a Godsend. The next place to get volunteers is through local support groups. Many adoption-related groups support the ISRR and RegDay. Even if you are not a member, try to get on the agenda at the next local meeting of that support group. Give a brief presentation about RegDay. Talk about your personal commitment to seeing adoptees and birthparents reconnected. Light your audience's fire by showing them your own, and then ask for volunteers. The last place we will discuss here is actually one of the most efficient places to find volunteers. On the Internet. If you belong to an adoption related forum (a mailing list, newsgroup or bulletin board), let people know that you are looking for folks in your area to help out. Please be sure that your request is "on topic" for the forum, or that you have the consent of those in charge of the forum to solicit help. 3. How often should I meet with my volunteers? As often as necessary to get the job done. Ambiguous as that answer may sound, it is right on the mark. Ideally, you should organize your group in a sit-down, face-to-face meeting two or three times before your event. Once tasks are delegated to volunteers, your focus should be on phoning and e-mailing them to make sure they are doing their job and to support them with any help they need getting it done. You will meet most frequently with those who are helping you organize local outreach and publicity. And you should have a wrap-up social with your volunteers after the event, to celebrate your hard work and your friendships. 4. What if I can't find anyone in my area to help me? If you have tried and exhausted all means of getting volunteers, and it looks like just you and your dog Rex will be working your site, don't despair. Setting up a card table at your local library for one or two hours, getting flyers put up around town, and getting 3 people to register with ISRR is just as important a work as any mega site will accomplish no matter how big their organization. And, those 3 people you help get registered? They are now prime candidates to help you next year. :-) Although it is possible for the above scenario to happen, it is highly unlikely. Adoptees and Birthparents come out of the woodwork at the most opportune times. You will more than likely find at least one other person to share the load and make your site work. 5. Avoiding Conflict Okay, now you have your volunteers, and you're meeting with them to start planning. Immediately, one of the volunteers, who you remember from that support group you spoke with last month, stands up and starts espousing ideas for how to make the site a great flurry of media attention by having volunteers picket outside the site with signs and a megaphone in a call for an immediate end to adoption (or sealed records, or open records, or whatever). Then another volunteer shouts out "Yeah, and we should call on all adoptees and birthparents to file petitions in court on the Friday before so we can overload the system and shut it down. That will get a lot of attention." What do you do? Avoiding conflict within your group will be a challenge that you must face, particularly if your group of volunteers gets large. One of the first steps to avoiding conflict is to establish friendly, firm leadership from the start. At your first meeting, explain what RegDay is all about. Set the precedent for the group by thanking them all for volunteering to help in our effort. If the leadership or majority of the site volunteers share a particular agenda regarding adoption issues or reform, feel free to provide educational or sign-up materials about these issues at your table but do not have large signs about the issue or make it more important than RegDay's mission on RegDay. Now, let's say you've done all that and there is still a heckler or two who insists on aggressively pushing an agenda which is not RegDay's agenda. Try to get some time alone with this person, away from the group. In that setting listen to all of their ideas. Allow them to feel the satisfaction of being heard. You do not need to agree with them, you do not need to feel pressure to appease them or do what they want. At this point, just let them talk and let them share what their burden is. Once they have stopped talking, it is your turn. Share your goals, share the RegDay goals. Don't challenge their desires, don't point out differences, just share what is on you heart and on the agenda for RegDay. If they interrupt, let them. When they have finished their interruption, go back to where you left off. You can avoid being taken on a tangent by saying "I'll get to that later. As I was saying…". Let them know that there are other venues for more aggressive activism on their agenda and ask them to join an adoption reform activism group for that. When you have finished sharing your goals and thoughts as a leader and the goals and thoughts of RegDay, ask the individual if they are committee to working with you to see where these two sets of goals - ours and theirs - are the same. Ask them to commit to finding these areas and working with you as a leader to accomplish these common goals. If the individual is fundamentally opposed to doing RegDay any way but their way, let them know that above all else you must work towards the goals of the group. Don't openly disagree, don't challenge, just show your position as being responsible for carrying out the goals of RegDay's agenda. Let the individual know that you are glad for this time to clear the air, and that the best possible solution is to part ways as respected colleagues. Copyright 1997 by S. Cameron Byrd, updated 1998-2000 by Damsel Plum, edited 2003 by Petra B. Wynbrandt. All Rights Reserved Next >>> Promoting Your Site RegDay home page www.adopteerights.org