This article spoke volumes to me. And actually lifted my spirits. To think that I could be useful and feel productive during these times would be a gift. The comments made me realize that the organizations would have lots of issues with us grannies entering the picture. So I am going to search for a small community run organization that might need my skills. I might not make a big difference but perhaps I can make a small difference and stop feeling useless, defeated and hung out to dry. I am not done yet.
Volunteerism has fallen victim to lawyer led liability concerns.
To the person who said the administration bill to the FT staff is not worth the scratch, well get a volunteer to be the overall administrator of the volunteers! There are literally thousands of people with the experience required to organize, delegate, and control armies of staff.
Thank you Laura….so true there are lots of us very willing to help. I am tired of negative messaging it is time for positive action. Doom and gloom news creates defeatism and despair….we must stop it and start moving forward.
Laura is right of course. But imagine the fallout from demonstrating that a lot of protected unionized jobs can be performed by volunteers. Don't look behind the curtain, whatever you do!
It's not hard to imagine that unions could easily decide to oppose volunteers for entirely parochial reasons. They'll see the use of volunteers as allowing employers to get work done for free that would otherwise require paying another union member. They'd be correct to a certain extent, but holding out for more union members to do the work just ends up meaning there's nobody to do the work. They wouldn't even have to pitch it that way - just raise concerns about competency, legal liability, and safety.
Wonderful sentiments. Unfortunately, Big Labour owns all the work the author suggests be done and without Gil McGowan’s permission it’s unlikely to be allowed.
The thing about volunteering is that it needs to be organic to work well. Once you institutionalise it, it just becomes its own inefficient silo.
The problem isn't with the "bureaucracy and lawyers" the problem is with Canadian culture and it's entitlement mentality around government services, coupled with a cultural acceptance of avoiding personal responsibility and consequences of actions.
The won't let us in the door. It used to be organic all the time. Parents help run the schools. They chose to shut that out and keep it shut and they are feeling the effects. Let us in!
Thank you Laura. I totally agree with you. I'm not happy with what the naysayers are saying about unions and lawyers opposing this kind of volunteerism; it's true but it's one example of where we have created too many rules and laws that are still in effect during these exceptional times.
While I agree that as a nation over the course of the pandemic there has been something lacking in terms of rallying the community, this is an incredibly naive take on making a difference at this crucial moment in time. Organizing volunteers within a workplace is an enormous amount of work for staff. The expenditure in terms of staff time in not worth the sparse resources.
Most of us are experienced parent volunteers - we're not going in blind. Most people who have worked full time their entire adult lives are blind to the contributions volunteers make in the community. I've often joked that if all the grandmas and stay at home moms decided "stuff it, I'm staying home", our society would crumble. We're literally witnessing it right now.
While naive, I still prefer this attitude over "that sounds too hard, let's continue with how we're going and hope for the best". There's got to be something volunteerism can help with in schools or hospitals, no matter how inconsequential or simple the task may be. Perhaps that's just misplaced optimism on my part.
All those staff have a job of being ready for "this crucial moment in time". The comically-awful growth in administrative staff in recent decades (now exceeding one administrator per bed in some places) includes full-timers for "emergency operations" exercises.
They should have had the lists of volunteers, their skills, their availability, all sitting ready in 2019. To not have done this during the quieter times between waves, in the last two years, is kind of unbelievable. This wave has been coming since early November, weeks when things were quiet. The flood response described above was organized within days.
I’m not sure how many quiet times there were between waves for hospital staff? And again, while there are no doubt some skilled volunteers out there, the majority can only contribute with a lot of oversight that is in short supply these days. Also, if you knew we should have been preparing for this in 2019, that’s amazing.
Cases were extremely low in Canada from the end of the first wave through the start of the second. Late May 2020, through early October. Five months.
CAN they only contribute through a lot of oversight, or do the Administrators insist on tons of oversight, so they have their bullshit jobs? I once managed a software project that cost a few hundred thousand in programming. Then we were to re-write it as an "official" corporate product, "overseen" by IT. My programmers hadn't needed any oversight to write it the first time, but did a bang-up job of a really clean complete re-write for $400,000. The bill from IT for the oversight and testing was $1.2 million, quadrupling my budget. IT contributed nothing but making sure it was OK by their self-invented documentation standards. (I checked with them for the documentation a few years later, and they'd thrown it away.)
I simply can't believe the sentence "Also, if you knew we should have been preparing for this in 2019, that’s amazing." The movie "Contagion" came out in 2011, and everybody was talking about it in 2020 because it so accurately described the pandemic. Director Stephen Soderburgh pleaded that he simply asked public health planners for the standard expectations of a pandemic, what they were planning for. It was updated for the US in 2014 as what was called Obama's "Pandemic Playbook", and absolutely included plans for mobilizing volunteers, just like there's a chapter on mobilizing the armed forces.
Canada had a pandemic playbook of its own, written ages ago by one Dr. Theresa Tam, but a funny coincidence. We screwed up on implementation, where "we" means "Theresa Tam", it was quite a story in April 2020:
The job where I worked was called "Emergency Operations and Continuity Management", and for a water/sewer utility of 1100 employees, three were full-time on that job,each just preparing 200 work days per year for the year that will surely come. It came for Calgary in 2013, with the flood, and we were pretty ready for that, we did as well as anybody could have.
Thank you. Exactly the kind of questions the employees ask themselves as their workplace went from low-administration to "highly administrated", a term that will now be in my vocabulary - as a term of approbation.
This article spoke volumes to me. And actually lifted my spirits. To think that I could be useful and feel productive during these times would be a gift. The comments made me realize that the organizations would have lots of issues with us grannies entering the picture. So I am going to search for a small community run organization that might need my skills. I might not make a big difference but perhaps I can make a small difference and stop feeling useless, defeated and hung out to dry. I am not done yet.
God bless you, Noreen. Beautiful people like you are why I wrote this.
Volunteerism has fallen victim to lawyer led liability concerns.
To the person who said the administration bill to the FT staff is not worth the scratch, well get a volunteer to be the overall administrator of the volunteers! There are literally thousands of people with the experience required to organize, delegate, and control armies of staff.
Start thinking out of the box!!
Thank you Laura….so true there are lots of us very willing to help. I am tired of negative messaging it is time for positive action. Doom and gloom news creates defeatism and despair….we must stop it and start moving forward.
Great piece. Sharing. 😎
Laura is right of course. But imagine the fallout from demonstrating that a lot of protected unionized jobs can be performed by volunteers. Don't look behind the curtain, whatever you do!
I imagine many jobs could be done by volunteers. Except for the fact that we need people to have jobs and pay taxes.
Excellent Laura, excellent
It's not hard to imagine that unions could easily decide to oppose volunteers for entirely parochial reasons. They'll see the use of volunteers as allowing employers to get work done for free that would otherwise require paying another union member. They'd be correct to a certain extent, but holding out for more union members to do the work just ends up meaning there's nobody to do the work. They wouldn't even have to pitch it that way - just raise concerns about competency, legal liability, and safety.
Wonderful sentiments. Unfortunately, Big Labour owns all the work the author suggests be done and without Gil McGowan’s permission it’s unlikely to be allowed.
The thing about volunteering is that it needs to be organic to work well. Once you institutionalise it, it just becomes its own inefficient silo.
The problem isn't with the "bureaucracy and lawyers" the problem is with Canadian culture and it's entitlement mentality around government services, coupled with a cultural acceptance of avoiding personal responsibility and consequences of actions.
The won't let us in the door. It used to be organic all the time. Parents help run the schools. They chose to shut that out and keep it shut and they are feeling the effects. Let us in!
Thank you Laura. I totally agree with you. I'm not happy with what the naysayers are saying about unions and lawyers opposing this kind of volunteerism; it's true but it's one example of where we have created too many rules and laws that are still in effect during these exceptional times.
Well said, there is much that COULD be being done in schools, and elsewhere!
While I agree that as a nation over the course of the pandemic there has been something lacking in terms of rallying the community, this is an incredibly naive take on making a difference at this crucial moment in time. Organizing volunteers within a workplace is an enormous amount of work for staff. The expenditure in terms of staff time in not worth the sparse resources.
Most of us are experienced parent volunteers - we're not going in blind. Most people who have worked full time their entire adult lives are blind to the contributions volunteers make in the community. I've often joked that if all the grandmas and stay at home moms decided "stuff it, I'm staying home", our society would crumble. We're literally witnessing it right now.
While naive, I still prefer this attitude over "that sounds too hard, let's continue with how we're going and hope for the best". There's got to be something volunteerism can help with in schools or hospitals, no matter how inconsequential or simple the task may be. Perhaps that's just misplaced optimism on my part.
All those staff have a job of being ready for "this crucial moment in time". The comically-awful growth in administrative staff in recent decades (now exceeding one administrator per bed in some places) includes full-timers for "emergency operations" exercises.
They should have had the lists of volunteers, their skills, their availability, all sitting ready in 2019. To not have done this during the quieter times between waves, in the last two years, is kind of unbelievable. This wave has been coming since early November, weeks when things were quiet. The flood response described above was organized within days.
I’m not sure how many quiet times there were between waves for hospital staff? And again, while there are no doubt some skilled volunteers out there, the majority can only contribute with a lot of oversight that is in short supply these days. Also, if you knew we should have been preparing for this in 2019, that’s amazing.
Cases were extremely low in Canada from the end of the first wave through the start of the second. Late May 2020, through early October. Five months.
CAN they only contribute through a lot of oversight, or do the Administrators insist on tons of oversight, so they have their bullshit jobs? I once managed a software project that cost a few hundred thousand in programming. Then we were to re-write it as an "official" corporate product, "overseen" by IT. My programmers hadn't needed any oversight to write it the first time, but did a bang-up job of a really clean complete re-write for $400,000. The bill from IT for the oversight and testing was $1.2 million, quadrupling my budget. IT contributed nothing but making sure it was OK by their self-invented documentation standards. (I checked with them for the documentation a few years later, and they'd thrown it away.)
I simply can't believe the sentence "Also, if you knew we should have been preparing for this in 2019, that’s amazing." The movie "Contagion" came out in 2011, and everybody was talking about it in 2020 because it so accurately described the pandemic. Director Stephen Soderburgh pleaded that he simply asked public health planners for the standard expectations of a pandemic, what they were planning for. It was updated for the US in 2014 as what was called Obama's "Pandemic Playbook", and absolutely included plans for mobilizing volunteers, just like there's a chapter on mobilizing the armed forces.
Canada had a pandemic playbook of its own, written ages ago by one Dr. Theresa Tam, but a funny coincidence. We screwed up on implementation, where "we" means "Theresa Tam", it was quite a story in April 2020:
https://www.theglobeandmail.com/canada/article-ottawa-had-a-playbook-for-a-coronavirus-like-pandemic-14-years-ago/
The job where I worked was called "Emergency Operations and Continuity Management", and for a water/sewer utility of 1100 employees, three were full-time on that job,each just preparing 200 work days per year for the year that will surely come. It came for Calgary in 2013, with the flood, and we were pretty ready for that, we did as well as anybody could have.
Thank you. Exactly the kind of questions the employees ask themselves as their workplace went from low-administration to "highly administrated", a term that will now be in my vocabulary - as a term of approbation.