Volunteer TW Services (was: Ethical Questions)

[Deborah Ray <debray -at- RAYCOMM -dot- COM>]

At 03:29 PM 6/23/98 -0400, you wrote:
>On Tue, 23 Jun 1998, Barbara Karst-Sabin wrote:
>I am fairly picky when it comes to volunteering my time.  So I do some
>research and choose groups that need and will appreciate my work.  These
>are also people you can use for references down the road.

I have yet to find a charitable organization that wants
volunteer TW services. No kidding!

For example, a few years ago I ended up talking to a woman
who was interested in having us develop informational
brochures and other materials for a local organization.
She put me in touch with the organization's president,
who determined that the only "valuable" services
we could offer would be through fundraising--that is,
cold-calling people on the phone.

And, years before that I had a similar experience
with an Animal Aid-type organization. I had been doing
some regular volunteer work for them and proposed
helping make a training video for adopting a new puppy
(the idea being that educating folks about what to expect
would help reduce the number of problems and, essentially,
reduce the number of returns to the doggie pound). I
mentioned that my folks trained dogs and could help
provide material for the video, etc. Instead of doing
the video, however, they latched onto the idea of
"having a trained dog" and decided that we should do
trained-dog demonstrations at local elementary schools.
Essentially, they wanted to show people a professionally-
trained dog and fool them into believing that that's
that they'd get in owning a pet. Furthermore, they
basically said if I didn't want to help coordinate the
dog demonstration, then they didn't want my services.

What's interesting here, I think, is that there's a
strong parallel between doing volunteer TW work and
working as a TW in a paid position. For example, folks
had a real misconception of what services they really
needed. The Animal Aid folks thought the way to solve a
high-doggie-return problem was to show little kids a
professionally-trained dog doing fancy tricks. Instead
what they really needed was to show people what animal
ownership involves: training, vet care, clean up, time,
patience, money, etc.

Also, I had to do a lot of educating folks about
what TWs do. And, at least in these two incidents, the
people were not convinced that they needed TW services;
they didn't see the value in what we can offer. Sound
familiar? Heck, you'd think that they could at least
see value in having someone volunteer to do work for
them, no matter what the area of expertise.

Currently, we volunteer a bit of time to a local
organization--but even that is mostly computer consulting,
not tech writing services. How about you folks? How
have you approached volunteer TW work, and what responses
have you had?

Deborah