We love highlighting the great work of our VolunteerSpot users. This week we hear from Kristin Price who works for the City of Lynwood, WA Parks, Recreation and Cultural Arts department.
Please tell us about your organization and your volunteer needs.
I work for the
City of Lynnwood’s Parks, Recreation & Cultural Arts Department in
Lynnwood, Washington - a city just north of Seattle. Our department has
many opportunities for volunteering including parks volunteers, Teen
Advisory Group, Aquatics volunteers and the Senior Center.
What I do is help to support those others in our department who coordinate volunteers for their programs as well as coordinate volunteers to work at our city’s community events. These events occur about 4-5 times a year and include Lynnwood Lights (seasonal holiday event), Spring Events (these are the ones currently listed with Volunteer Spot), 4th of July, etc.
This year is the city’s 50th Birthday Celebration and we are planning many additional fun events, thus have a potential for even more need of event volunteers.
How did you get started as a volunteer leader?
I have always been a volunteer – my parents encouraged me to volunteer at a very early age and I have never stopped. I have worked managing volunteers in my various jobs (including 3 years as a volunteer coordinator) for over 15 years including non-profit and now the public sector. I love volunteering and volunteers! Volunteering is a most rewarding way to give something back to your community and meet all kinds of people! - Also the same reasons I love managing volunteers – seeing individuals proud to serve and connect with their community, as well as getting to know so many wonderful people I may not have otherwise met.
What’s one piece of advice you have for volunteers or their leaders out there?
Advice for volunteer leaders: Remember that the volunteers are unpaid staff. Respect them and their time like you would anyone working for your organization.
Why did you decide to use VolunteerSpot?
I had been looking for something like this service for a while to streamline our volunteer recruiting efforts and take them online – where most of our volunteers are already. I only knew about one other free service like it and I was not happy with that one because it didn’t allow me to customize the information, it also did not have the privacy settings that I needed - all the volunteers could see anyone who had signed up, plus our city’s spam filters were keeping emails from this website from getting through to me. Overall, VolunteerSpot seems like a great resource for our organization – it’s easy to use and I can manage all the sign-ups in one location rather than dealing with individual sign-up sheets that groups print out and then send back to me with handwriting that I cannot read! I also love that it sends out reminders to the volunteers.
We salute Kristin Price and all the volunteer heroes out there everyday making our communities better places to live! If you're using VolunteerSpot, write and tell us about what you're doing, and give us a chance to shine our Volunteer Spotlight on you!! Just email us at VS@volunteerspot.com.
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