Have you ever willingly volunteered to get involved and help out your community? Maybe just something small at first, like volunteering to help clean up the local park? Then slowly you find yourself getting more involved and your activity moves to something more time consuming and significant?
Well, that is how it was for me volunteering at the local hospital. It started innocently enough about 10 years ago when I volunteered to help with a golf tournament raffle and sold tickets to the attendees. It was exhilarating to hear we had raised nearly $75,000 to help patient programs. I was hooked!
As the year's have flown by, I have been involved in all sorts of fund raising projects, Run/Walks, concerts, art shows, fashion shows, holiday memorials, and more. Of course, the reward for doing a good job is more work! And so, over the years I have advanced through ranks and am now President.
Being President of a volunteer group takes more work that I ever expected, dreamed or imagined. Motivating non paid volunteers is clearly the most work I have ever expended for no paycheck. So why do I bother?? Because it's actually rewarding to be able to help someone else and step away from my personal drama for a time.
My personal "non-paycheck" reward seems to be the thank-you notes stemming from our non-fundraising projects we provide to the patients. Those would include our cancer quilt program where each new patient gets a handmade quilt, the teddy bears we sew for the scared and frightened pediatric patients visiting the emergency room, the free acupuncture gift certificates we provide the chemotherapy patients, and the homemade pediatric pillow cases provided by the ConKerr group. These are the things that make it all seem worthwhile!
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It's a job you are doing but you just don't get paid for it. You probably put way more than 40 hours a week in if you add it up. We wouldn't have this great country if it weren't for people who can actually volunteer their time instead of getting a paycheck.
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