Processing School Volunteers
We love volunteers! And, often, we want to help them through whatever bureaucratic hoops they need to jump through to get credit from their school for volunteering here.
But how do we process them? Who's their supervisor? What do we ask them? Where's my chocolate?!?
It's all a matter of 1) paperwork and 2) the number of hours they need to volunteer at Free Geek. The questions you should ask:
- Will you need evaluation(s) of your performance filled out by Free Geek? Or will a printed and signed timesheet of your volunteer hours work fine?
- How many hours will you need to complete to fulfill your requirement?
Medium to long evaluations and/or 30 Hours+
Is their eval longer than 1 page and require some thought? Maybe there's multiple evals for us to fill out, and the kid is volunteering a nice chunk of hours? (i.e., Does it look like their school wants them to learn a lot, perhaps through a more guided learning experience, and prove that they've done well through a lengthy evaluation?)
These folks need a Free Geek supervisor to guide them through the process and watch them enough to be able to truthfully fill out an evaluation of their performance.
Send these students through the internship program. They'll need to apply before we can fill out any paperwork for them through: http://freegeek.org/internships.
10-15 hours, very short eval
These folks can be sent to Liane. She's willing to take them on as long as they volunteer only in recycling when she's working back there, and provided they introduce themselves to her during their first volunteer shift so she knows she'll need to evaluate them later on.
More details at Service Learning Volunteers.
No eval, just timesheet
Dude, no problem. Let them in with no roadblocks.
Any front desk worker can print out the student's hours at the completion of his/her hours and sign it if necessary. For these volunteers, the front desk is the most accurate assessor of the legitimacy of those hours, and therefore the most qualified to sign off on them.