How do you recruit and use volunteers?

[Ellen McDermott]

In my little corner of northern NJ, I see that some districts have parent volunteers and others do not. If you do have volunteers, what do you have them do, and how do you motivate them? I would like to have volunteers have some fun so they're not just shelving books all day!

How do you recruit volunteers?

Thanks..

[Carolyn Foote]

We have a large volunteer program in our district.

What they do varies from campus to campus. Some campuses use them to help with circulation, creating displays, or book processing.

We also use ours for special events like book fairs, poetry events, etc., that we host. Some volunteers like to come weekly, while others just like to help with the special events. Sometimes help just means bringing cookies for the event, or selling t-shirts for it; sometimes it means actually helping during the book fair or event.

We have shifts for the volunteers and sometimes try to schedule them in pairs--it's more fun for them to work with a partner and it helps with getting them to come in regularly since they know their partner is coming.

Hope that helps!

[Gretchen Hazlin]

Our library (middle school, 2 librarians, no library clerk) has four parent volunteers, one on each day of the week except for Friday. They come in for an hour or two (or sometimes not at all...) and generally do shelving. Sometimes, in order to keep them from running away screaming, they process new books or put together a display or something. We use a zillion over the course of our book fair (upwards of 70), but luckily, coordinating those volunteers is done by the PTA. We also will be using a batch of volunteers for end of the year shelf reading and will bribe them with free lunch. We get our regular volunteers a gift around the holidays and at the end of the school year (Starbucks gift cards, B&N gift cards, etc.). I don't know if that keeps them motivated and I'm looking forward to hear from other people on this topic. I'd like to rely more on our volunteers, so I'd love to see other responses. Carolyn's idea about working in pairs is a good one!