Tuesday 19 August 2014

volunteering

I did a woodland charity talk today, in Romford.  It is slightly daft for somebody to drive from east of Colchester to inside the M25 to preach the word on environmental conservation, but half the time the charity doesn't seem to have a volunteer from that side of the county.  I think they may have at the moment, since they found somebody to cover for me once when I couldn't do a talk, but I haven't met him and don't honestly know where he lives.  Maybe he is another north Essex resident who'll trek down the A12 when circumstances require.

I rarely meet my fellow volunteers.  I have a cordial email relationship with the paid member of staff who coordinates our efforts, and have met her in the flesh a few times, originally when she brought the digital projector over, and then at the odd conference, but the other speakers are mostly a mystery.  They need not be, nowadays, since the charity has recently started a volunteers' online forum.  Unfortunately from my point of view they have chosen to make it a closed group on Facebook, and since I don't want to join Facebook I haven't signed up to the forum.  Before settling on a host they surveyed us for our preferred option, and I replied that I was quite happy to use LinkedIn, but was not prepared to try and negotiate Facebook's privacy settings which I believed were designed to confuse.  I was obviously in the minority, and the forum has gone ahead without me.  I stick to my guns.  I don't want to join Facebook.

There used to be a volunteer speaker from Chelmsford or thereabouts, but as his work got busier he had to give up.  I covered for him at Hatfield Peveril, or maybe Kelvedon, when he'd taken the booking and then had a late meeting on the day and couldn't make it.  Groups who book a speaker generally only know that somebody is coming to talk about trees, and while the organiser has our names and contact details they don't especially care who it is.  Half of them don't even grasp that we are volunteers, but think we work for the charity, so the Hatfield Peveril (or Kelvedon) lot were not as impressed as they might have been to have a speaker roll up and save them from having no entertainment for the evening's meeting, who twenty-four hours previously hadn't been planning on giving a talk that night, or going out at all.

There was a cheerful little chap with a neat beard from Manningtree who'd taken up volunteering after retiring from some multinational conglomerate.  I got the impression he'd been professionally involved in marketing, so he should have been good at talks, but he didn't seem to last very long.  I think he got downhearted that he kept being offered gigs at the other end of the county.  There was a strange man from Harwich, who borrowed the projector in the early days of providing volunteers with digital projectors, but he disappeared from the scene again as well.

I once needed to find my own substitute, before the charity's email cover became as thorough as it is now, and back in the days when we were given contact details of other speakers and left to liaise. My mother-in-law's funeral fell on a day when I was due to give a talk, and I didn't think I was going to be back in time, or be in the mood to entertain a room full of people, or want to leave the Systems Administrator sitting alone at home.  I tried ringing a man in Ipswich, who gave me a lecture on how young people today left everything to the last minute, and didn't give me a chance to explain why I needed someone else to do the talk.  He dropped out of the scheme soon afterwards, and I heard on the grapevine he'd forgotten to go to a meeting and left his hosts high and dry with no entertainment.  (The thought of that bothers me, and I make suggestions to the beekeepers that we should have an emergency quiz prepared in case of a no show booked speaker, but we have never got round to writing one, or copying someone else's).  After the righteous man in Ipswich I tried a woman called Judy, who heard me out as to why I needed cover and said without hesitation that she'd do it.

Today's talk seemed to go well.  They were a very nice, friendly group of ladies, who seemed interested.  My only regret is that while I was starting to load my car afterwards, somebody cleared away the last of my mug of tea before I'd finished it, and the second chocolate digestive biscuit which I was thinking about eating.  Romford is a long way, though.  Any volunteers from Sarf Essex?

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