Voluntary or paid work for chairty?

Newly_retired

Hope this is the right board. At the charity I work for, there is quite a bit of bad feeling as a job has been granted funding, so someone will be doing it for pay, whereas lots of others are still doing it voluntarily. ( Answering a phone helpline) Anyone else experienced this? Any advice?

fengirl_2

Thats the nature of the voluntary sector! No one forces anyone to volunteer (well, not yet), and many people do it for reasons other than money. People in the organisation should know how difficult funding is to obtain and that not all roles can be paid. I'm afraid that the answer is to either carry on in that charity or volunteer elsewhere.

Savvy_Sue

Are they all doing the same job, just one person's being funded for it while others volunteer? Or has a job been created and funded which includes something that others do as volunteers, but the staff member has additional responsibilities, maybe for training new volunteers, or drawing up the rota, or keeping them in touch with the organisation?

I do agree with fengirl, we couldn't do what we do without our volunteers, but some of them do very similar things to our paid staff. They tend not to do as many hours, however ...

Newly_retired

The staff job is unsupervised, whereas the volunteers are supervised, that's the only real difference. Some of the volunteers have now opted out of this particular task and are doing other sorts of voluntary tasks. I feel like a bit of a "scab" as I have just started training to do this task, as part of an overall training package, and now I am wondering whether I should. I plan to complete the training, then probably opt out of this task, but I would have done that anyway. As a volunteer there is no reason why you cannot choose which aspects of the work you want to do.