Blog Action Day: Volunteering

I’m not on the Clean Run list, so I don’t know what the status is in the USA regarding volunteers at trials. I suspect that it’s the same as it is here, and across Europe, and the rest of the world.

I am probably not the best person to be blogging about this for one fairly obvious reason: I don’t offer to volunteer. Or rather, I don’t offer to volunteer at Kennel Club shows.

You can offer T-shirts, sandwiches, raffle tickets, goody bags, gifts, refunds, whatever, but if you only give me the option of a half-day or full-day to offer to volunteer for, I’m not ticking anything.

I help at BAA shows because …. well, it’s a condition of entering, but it’s mainly because they are way more flexible about volunteering. I go and volunteer at a ring when I know I do not have any upcoming classes, and I volunteer for as long as I can. Sometimes that’s only 30mins, sometimes it’s 2 or 3 hours. Sometimes it’s for 5mins so someone else can go and run their dog, or walk a course. Sometimes it’s just for the time it takes to change the course. I get to decide when I start helping and when I finish helping. And as long as I’ve helped in some capacity, the Ring Manager lets me sign off my name, I’ve fulfilled my obligation and I’ve usually had fun chatting with everyone else whilst I do it.

If I could do this at KC shows, I probably would*. As it happens, I usually lend a hand course changing and so on anyway, but I don’t feel I can commit to a certain length of time on a certain day.

I imagine there are a lot of other people who are in a similar position to me. I also know that there are some people who will not volunteer regardless of what you offer, how flexible you are, how wonderfully you treat them. I think that’s kind of rude, but they may have valid reasons that I simply don’t know. I am always prepared to give the benefit of the doubt.

I suspect that the people that are really being complained about are the ones who never help but expect the rest of us to drop everything to do so. They’re the ones who complain about the classes not running on time, the queue being too long, the results not being published fast enough, etc etc etc. And I hate to say it, but I think agility has to accept that these people will always be around and that there is nothing we can do about it.

So, appreciate the volunteers you do have, treat them well, and hope you never have to rely on the complainers to do it.

*Actually, I have to confess I probably wouldn’t. Because I do help at BAA, and it is an expectation of entry that flyball teams help to ring party, so I always help at every flyball tournament I attend as well. KC shows are my 1-in-3 show where I don’t help out, which I think is fair.

ETA: A point I just remembered, and probably should have added. I don’t seriously think that the volunteering situation in the UK is a problem. Remember, an average sized show here has 8-12 rings running simultaneously, all staffed with enough happy volunteers to keep shows running and expanding. Of course, we do other things differently too which probably have a big impact — our classes are bigger (200 dogs is average for a class), cheaper (£2.80 a run avg at the moment, that’s $4.50), and because shows are geographically closer together, there’s a lot of “I’ll help at your show if you help at mine”. I wonder how much of an impact that has on the amount of people volunteering? I think Daisy Peel actually looked at this cross-Atlantic problem really well, and made me appreciate the system we have here.