Before Christmas is was too few volunteers going crazy trying to keep up.
Now we've got volunteers coming out of our ears and we need to switch from frantically trying to do everything to making sure we get as much of our to-do list done as possible with all this young energetic labor on board.
Some of them arranged to come ahead of time. Others were thrust upon us because they were staying with a local Pastor who needed to give them something to do. Whether you need people or not it's best to say yes and have the volunteers see your organization in action but it can be a scramble. Our recycling was never better attended to or our clients groceries carried out to their cars with more enthusiasm than today.
The most creative use of all this energy was to put a 15-foot institutional sized sink on the roof of one of our storage trailers. That's right. The ROOF!! I'm still not sure if we're trying to hide it, sell it, secure it or show it off on Google Earth.
To make life even more exciting, I got a visit from a Parish 'official' trying to land a work-for-stay arrangement for some kid from New York who went to the old Camp Hope where he had such an arrangement a year or so ago and then ended up with said Parish 'official'. Pointing the kid in the right direction would have been one thing but the last thing I needed was to get in the middle of anything having to do with the Parish and the Community Center. The same Parish folks who decided to shut us down the Monday before Thanksgiving when we were doing both our regular food pantry and our monthly 'Food for Seniors'.
It was Pastor Randy from the church I had stayed at before who had sent them to me hoping I could help, not realizing I was paying rent to the owner of the house where I was staying and not really at liberty to give out spots to strangers. Fortunately, Sharon at the Community Center gave me some good suggestions to pass on to them and it ended amicably. But I let it be known that in the future if anyone from the Parish came asking for me...tell them I'm dead.