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Volunteer program

Status: Draft, pre-formation. Intended for adoption by the founding board with the founding bylaws and core policies.

The Ganjier Guild is a member-led 501©(6) trade association. Most of its working capacity in Year 1 — and a meaningful share thereafter — comes from volunteers: members who give their time on committees, projects, and at events. This program manual describes how the Guild recruits, screens, trains, supervises, recognizes, and offboards them.

Why a program, not ad-hoc volunteering

Trade associations that treat volunteer effort as informal favors tend to:

  • Burn out a small number of people who say yes to everything
  • Concentrate institutional knowledge in those few people
  • Create legal exposure when volunteers act outside their authority
  • Lose volunteers when life changes, with no graceful path back in

A real program is the corrective. It treats volunteer effort as a planned resource with defined roles, supervision, and recognition — the same way payroll is treated.

Program philosophy

  1. Volunteers are not free labor. They are governed assets. Every role has a description, a supervisor, a defined scope, and a defined exit.
  2. Scope is bounded. Volunteers do not sign contracts, speak for the Guild, handle restricted funds, or access member PII without specific written authorization.
  3. The Guild trains before it asks. No volunteer takes on a role without orientation to the Code of Ethics, the Code of Conduct, the Conflict of Interest policy, and any role-specific training.
  4. Supervision is named, not implied. Every volunteer has exactly one staff or board supervisor for that role.
  5. Recognition is structural, not sentimental. It is calendared, public, and proportional to contribution.
  6. Exit is graceful. Stepping away is encouraged when life changes. Alumni stay welcome.

Scope of "volunteer" in this manual

This manual covers three categories of volunteer engagement:

Category Examples Typical commitment
Committee volunteers Audit & Finance, Nominating & Governance, Membership & Ethics, Education & Certification, Events, Communications, Advocacy 4–8 hours/month, 1-year terms, renewable twice
Event volunteers Conference greeters, session moderators, program reviewers for the founding convening 4–20 hours per event
Project volunteers Time-bounded contributions to specific deliverables (e.g., a curriculum draft, a member-portal usability test) Defined per project charter

This manual does not cover:

  • Board service — see governance/board-onboarding/
  • Paid contractors — covered under contract, not under this program
  • Anonymous community contributions to the proposal repo on GitHub — those are governed by CONTRIBUTING.md and the repo license

How this manual fits with other governance documents

The volunteer program does not replace any policy. It applies them.

Documents in this folder

File Purpose
README.md This program overview
role-catalog.md Concrete volunteer roles, time commitment, prerequisites, supervisor
onboarding.md Application → screening → orientation → first 90 days
training-and-supervision.md Required training, supervision, and feedback cadence
recognition-and-offboarding.md Recognition, milestones, graceful exit, alumni
data-and-records.md What is stored where, retention, privacy posture

Roles and accountability for the program itself

Role Accountability
Volunteer Program Lead (staff or designated volunteer) Day-to-day operation of the program; intake, matching, records
Committee chairs Direct supervision of committee volunteers within their committee
Event leads Direct supervision of event volunteers for that event only
Project sponsors (a board member or staff lead) Direct supervision of project volunteers within that project
Board Secretary Ensures volunteer roster, COI disclosures, and acknowledgements are current at the January board meeting
Audit & Finance committee Reviews any volunteer access to financial systems annually

Key principles in plain language

  • If we cannot describe the role in one paragraph, the role is not ready to recruit for.
  • If we cannot say who supervises a volunteer, we are not ready to onboard them.
  • If we cannot say how to thank them and when to ask them to step down, we should not ask them to start.
  • If we cannot say what data we will hold about them and for how long, we should not collect it.

Linked documents