Volunteers v Paid staff

I recently offered my time as a volunteer to help a heritage pumping station, they were very grateful as the skills I can offer are in short supply but I now face a bit of a dilemma.

It seems they have a building in dire need of alteration to become their shop but none of their existing volunteer force was willing to take on the considerable work involved. Following negotiation, one of them priced up the project and has taken it on as a paid job. No problem, and a good solution except I (and others), are expected to help with it, totally unpaid of course.

Whilst I am totally willing to provide my time and skills for the good of the organisation, I'm not sure that I want to provide free professional skill to someone who will be personally very well financially rewarded. I'm really considering walking away but I also want to support the place, do you have any suggestions?

 

Paid staff and volunteers do need to work together but this seems to be a very different situation.I personally would not assist on principle.Is there some other part of the site you can volunteer on.

 

I guess it depends whether the person who was awarded the contract will make more money if volunteer labour is provided or whether the job was priced on the basis that volunteer labour would be used.

 

But how was the job priced? It would not be unusual for a project to involve contracted skills in part paid at market or hopefully discounted rates whilst volunteers reduced overall cost by providing other input. What would clearly be wrong would be for the contractor to charge a full price based on all paid labour and then to pocket the unpaid wages which arise from the volunteer input. I would expect the organisation to be reasonably open about the arrangements or else as suggested by others walk away and volunteer elsewhere. The last similar project I worked on had a schedule of savings based on the volunteer input which not only kept everything clear but also helped motivate the volunteers as they could see how their efforts contributed and avoided the need for other fund raising.

 

This happens all the time in volunteering. Quite often there are paid staff supervising volunteers at work or managing projects for any number of reasons. This is probably no different. If the chap was being paid to do the whole job they would not be expecting you to lend a hand. At least, I hope not!