Volunteers and volunteering

In the New Abstentionists thread, I made a post about an American organization called Housing Works, and said that if the Alliance is to aspire to something, I'd love it if we could aspire to be a British equivalent to Housing Works. Not so much because of its focus on housing, but because of the sheer spread of services that they offer, and their ability to provide a care package to their clients that is genuinely life transforming -- and they do so from a harm reduction perspective. When these abstentionists claim that there's only one way towards recovery, Housing Works stands like a beacon, illuminating the falsity of these extreme ideological claims.

I met one of the founders, the late Keith Cylar, a couple of times and had a long discussion with him about how he'd achieved his goals. This was a long, long time ago -- back in 1992 or so. At that time, Housing Works was a much smaller operation than it is today. Keith had been a member of ACT-UP, and the early NY harm reduction movement. That's all interesting too, because many Americans seemed to struggle with Harm Reduction at that time. I can remember one prominent NY activist refusing to call what he did HR, insisting on the more politically acceptable term, 'Recovery Readyness',

But I digress. One of the key things that had built Housing Works from a dream into an enormous empire of humanity and good practice was volunteers.

America has a very different attitude to volunteers than we do. Here in the UK, volunteers tend to be people who are lacking in skills and experience who want to join an organization in the hope that it will provide them with the training and experience that can remedy their lack of a job.

In the USA, in contrast, the volunteer labour force is the exact opposite. It tends to be the highly skilled middle and upper middle class who are seeking to put something back in return for their good fortune. And so organizations like Housing Works, or Howard Josepher's organization, Exponents, get help doing things like writing complex bids, setting up training programmes, etc. from people who have the skills and the experience to do that stuff and to do it well.

A quick aside: most of the people that I met who were acting as volunteers in this capacity tended to fall into one of two categories. They were either ex-users, who had become drug free via AA or NA and who had developed professional careers outside the drugs field, subsequent to their becoming abstinent and were now looking to give something back. Or they were active recreational users whose use was relatively unproblematic, also working in high skill/high status occupations, also wanting to give something back. One might thing that the two groups wouldn't get on very well, given the opposing viewpoints. However, the nature of the projects that they were volunteering for meant that the 12 steppers weren't the stereotypical, stick-up-the-arse, goose-stepping twelve-stepper that puts everybody outside of their culr off using it as intended.

The Alliance, in contrast, has to struggle from hand to mouth with a management team that's too small to manage the paid staff we have, let alone a team of volunteers. Nevertheless, as the largest and possibly the oldest user-led drugs project in the UK, it's important that we do find ways of mentoring people and of passing on the knowledge and experience we acquire as a consequence of doing the work.

I'm curious about how people feel about the whole volunteering issue. In a lot of areas, users are paid to attend local user groups. Although these are usually couched in terms of expenses rather than payment for work done. This seems enormously problematic to me. If we're to own user groups, have them be truly ours, then we also need to develop a sense of genuine ownership over them, have them belong to us. Helping people out in terms of fares, etc. is one thing. Offering inducements is something else again. And so I wonder if it skews the people who will actually be prepared to turn up to such meetings?

It becomes even more problematic when it comes to sitting on various committees. Everybody else in the room is being paid to be there, *except* the user, and so it would seem perfectly reasonable for the DAT or whoever to pay that user for their time. However, offering a financial incentive makes it attractive to people who might not otherwise be interested in doing so. Where that person is representing a local user group, then it can be even more difficult. Does any payment go to the user who attends, or to the group in general? Even if that user doesn't have a job

Long post. Sorry. Let me get to the questions I'd like to pose:

Firstly: is it even possible to try and cultivate the sort of volunteering ethos that the Americans have here in the UK? Here, we expect all basic services to be provided for us -- quite rightly, in my opinion -- from the stable to the grave. Over there, even stuff as fundamental as a fire service might be based on a volunteer work force. And if it is possible, how do we identify those talented and committed people and start putting them to best use?

Secondly, what do people think about the issue of payments to users? Do they skew involvement in any way? Do they make users and user groups more beholden to DATs, services, the NTA, whoever happens to be paying the bills?

Finally, the Alliance has always had a mentoring role, bringing along new, young advocates and activists, giving them training and experience in a range of ways. Unfortunately, as the staff team has grown, the necessity of managing a large staff team with a tiny number of managers has meant that we've lacked the organizational resources to provide this mentoring on an ad-hoc basis. Although we still do it for people in projects that we've been commissioned to work with, we don't have the resources to do it for as many people as we'd like to do it for. If anyone has any interesting and creative ideas about how we can continue to make use of those enthusiastic and committed people who do want to get involved, without it being such a drain on our resources that we're not able to offer adequate support leaving people feeling disappointed and disillusioned.

Links to the two NYC projects I discuss in this post:

http://exponents.org/
http://www.housingworks.org/home_f.html