Lesson 3: Finding & Keeping Volunteers

Finding Volunteers 

People in your community are looking for ways to connect with others and with meaningful activities. Your garden program offers both connection and meaningful work.

Start with people YOU Know - One solid way to start a volunteer program is to first reach out to people you know. Are you a member of a church, sorority, or social club? Tell them about your garden. Invite them to help.  Include information in church bulletins, community newsletters, and calendars. Post flyers at your center that list garden hours and invite people to help. If your center is in a place with a neighborhood association, include an invitation in their newsletter. Talk to neighbors. Again, invite people to get involved. Sometimes people are curious but not sure if they’re allowed to help. Make it clear to the community that their participation is needed and welcome. Ask neighbors when they are available and try to schedule volunteer or garden hours that work for the most people.

Local businesses - Some businesses allow their employees to volunteer as a community benefit. We’ve worked with volunteers from Max Credit Union, CarMax, and other businesses. In larger cities, corporations also donate money, often a specific amount like $100 per staff member, when they send staff to volunteer. We haven’t figured out how to ask businesses in our area for financial contributions along with volunteers, but know this is pretty standard practice in places like Boston and New York City.

Local organizations - Master Gardeners are people who love gardening and receive hours of training in horticulture. To maintain their Master Gardener Certification, they must volunteer in the community for a certain number of hours every year. Our county’s Master Gardener program provides hours of volunteer support to many of our projects including field trips, volunteer days, and special events. They teach classes at the farm, and set aside several beds for Master Gardeners to use as their own teaching garden.

Scout troops need garden projects to complete certain badge requirements. Scouts seeking Eagle or Gold awards are looking for projects that fill a long term need for a community. At E.A.T. South, scouts have earned their Eagle Awards building wheelchair accessible picnic tables (they must fundraise for all the materials and find the people to build the tables), adding a section of sidewalk to make the farm more accessible, and building large planters for trees.

Some religious groups have social justice or community engagement committees who might organize a group to volunteer with you. The Junior League, a women’s leadership organization, offers annual grants that include members’ volunteering to complete projects for nonprofit organizations.

Organizations that encourage volunteering in the community - HandsOn River Region is a United Way project that hosts a website to match volunteers with volunteer opportunities in our area. Just Serve is another organization championing volunteering in our community. Organizations set up profiles on these sites and list volunteer opportunities. We typically receive a few messages a month from individuals and groups who find us through these sites. 

Plan for regular volunteer days - Regular monthly or weekly volunteer days allow people to learn and help who may not be a part of a group. You can also invite people who may initially volunteer with a group to participate in your weekly or monthly volunteer projects. People who return week after week are likely to become your garden leaders and core volunteers you can depend on when you may be away from the farm or have a task that requires someone you can trust to be there.

Pick a consistent day like the second Saturday morning of each month or every Friday morning at 9 am. Think about who might be available during the times you are considering. Retired people may be more available on a weekday morning and families more available during the weekend. 

In the spring, as the days get longer and before the Alabama heat really sets in, we host evening volunteer projects from 4-6 pm. This allows people to drop in after work, learn new skills, and help us grow. We let people know that if they can’t be there right at 4, to come when they can. You can also host evening projects from 5–7 if daylight permits. We chose 4-6 because we wanted to get home for dinner with our families. Pick a time that works for you and your volunteers.

Tip: check community calendars to avoid conflicting activity schedules.

Does another group host a regular activity on the second Saturday of the month or during the time you are planning regular projects? If your local media outlets or other organizations host community calendars, check to see if someone has an activity that might be similar to your project or might draw in people you hope to attract. 

Sometimes you just can’t avoid conflicts. In Alabama in the fall, Saturday mornings are usually youth sports practices, and Saturday afternoons are when college football teams play. We’ve found that Sunday afternoons after 1pm can work for people in our community. Ultimately, schedule the day and time that works for you. 

After ten years of hosting projects, volunteers find us. School groups of all ages, university students, scouts, Master Gardeners, officers in training (we are near an Air Force base), and church and civic groups all email us when they want to do a project. Since we have one full time staff person, we have the capacity to host multiple groups and projects a month. Building relationships with these groups over time has led to their return year after year. Be organized, gracious, and grateful, and your group will have an active volunteer base.

Tip: avoid burn out.

Look at your calendar and make sure YOU have some time off. If you’re trying to start or build a volunteer program, you’ll probably need to schedule some projects on evenings and weekends. A regular, weekly Saturday morning project might be great for bringing neighbors into the garden, but does that work for you and your life? If so, great. Do it!

E.A.T. South’s staff have families, and we found that regular Saturday projects took away our time with our own children. If you’re feeling resentful about your work, it shows and doesn’t lead to a successful volunteer program. We decided to put a limit of no more than one Saturday of work a month (including outreach at community events). We break this rule in April when everyone else is excited about gardening, but try to hold to it during the rest of the year. We also started scheduling workshops on Sunday afternoons when one of our children is involved in an enrichment program.

Celebrating our Volunteers - E.A.T. South’s Volunteer Thank You Breakfast

Every first Saturday in November, E.A.T. South staff cook breakfast for our volunteers. Our menu includes coffee, juice, fruit, pancakes, scrambled eggs, and sometimes muffins. We ask a local coffee shop to donate coffee, have a crockpot full of hot applesauce or stewed fruit, set up electric griddles outside, and keep the pancakes and farm scrambled eggs cooking for two hours. We may ask for donations or make muffins in advance so early arrivals have something to eat while the pancakes and eggs cook.

Some of our volunteers are vegan so we make vegan pancakes and muffins, too. Knowing about your volunteers’ allergies and food preferences signals to them that you know and care about them.

Organize an event or activity that works for your group. You could host a breakfast or pizza party. It could be a sit down dinner with a formal presentation and awards or something more informal.

Our breakfast is informal, gives volunteers a chance to meet new people and chat, and is something we staff enjoy doing. Pick something that works for you and your organization. The overall goal is to let volunteers know their work is meaningful to your organization and garden.

While the focus of our volunteer breakfast is always thanking and celebrating our volunteers, we sometimes invite our supervisors and city councilors. Make sure they know they are being invited to a VOLUNTEER thank you breakfast - that this is about your program’s volunteers. Sometimes they attend. Having supervisors or community leaders meet volunteers and hear their stories underscores the importance and value of your programs.

On Volunteers & Making Mistakes

What if volunteers mess things up? Well, they might, but probably not as bad as you imagine they would. There was a time when the media was full of stories about how failure was good (for already wealthy tech CEOs). Have you ever broken something at work, forgotten to do something, or messed up? Probably, and my guess is you were not patted on the back and told it was a learning experience. Making mistakes and learning from them is a gift we don’t often receive in our work or home lives, but we can give this gift of learning in the garden. 

When starting a project with volunteers, explain what you want them to do and demonstrate it. Work alongside them to answer questions and give suggestions. Most mistakes in the garden involve planting seeds too deeply or not planting transplants deep enough. Maybe a plant gets pulled instead of a weed. In a teaching garden, these are opportunities for learning. Demonstrate how to plant or explain the difference between the plants and the weed again. Reinforce the idea that we are all learning, and we all make mistakes. Be kind.

Allowing for mistakes, working with them gracefully, will help you keep volunteers and grow new gardeners. To grow your own food, to garden, is a life-long learning process. We all make mistakes. Some people are so fearful of messing up, they can’t even start a garden. Find ways to lightly or joyfully acknowledge mistakes, use them as an opportunity to teach, and you will help people become new gardeners.