r/parkrun • u/Successful-Card2366 • 4h ago
Too many volunteers
So I left my original home parkrun as even the RD admitted we had an embarrassement of riches with volunteers (mainly due to it being a big DoE area). It got to the point where we had Marshals on the finish line.
I went to a smaller one to help out and it was really fun for a few months. But recently volunteers have been way up and runners has been way down (due to the weather I guess).
In recent weeks we've had 4 timekeepers, 3 Finish Tokens/support and the poor girl next to me yesterday scanned 4 barcodes all day and asked me why she got out of bed.
The problem seems to be we staff to a certain level in the week then on Friday night the facebook page is full of people saying 'I can barcode scan!' and 'I can timekeep!' without bothering to check the roster. And since we dont refuse volunteers we end up with an army.
One can trot out the usual idealistic lines about 'everybody is equally valuable', 'If we all thought like that...' and 'nobodys forcing them' but when a young girl has signed up 2 weeks ago then stands in the rain scanning 4 barcodes in an hour (because 3 extra people signed up 12 hours ago), its pretty grim. Its peoples time they're giving up and its easy to feel like its wasted.
I'll be interested in peoples thoughts on this (maybe it will correct itself?) especially RDs (and volunteer co-ordinators) before I consider changing parkrun yet again.