Building on the work of the 2019 committee, our club's agreed volunteer strategy is to:
- Ensure volunteers are well supported to ensure the experience is a rewarding one,
- Identify critical roles to ensure backup is in place,
- Ensure reasonable understandable coverage under our insurance policies and compliance with legal requirements,
- Offer, when necessary, tangible thanks to volunteers, in proportion to the skills, qualifications, effort and/or reliability/commitment needed for the role, and
- Review volunteer expenditure (including vouchers and money) and associated arrangements regularly to ensure they are appropriate and represent good value to the club.
The volunteer strategy is part of our club's ongoing Playing Rules and Operating Procedures.
Peninsula is possibly the largest bridge club in the country which is still run almost exclusively by volunteers. Most clubs that are not businesses are either much smaller (less than 200 members) or run by a full-time manager, often with administrative staff.
We are very proud of the club’s volunteer ethos and tradition, which contributes to the warm, friendly community feeling that makes our club so special. We generally seek volunteers before using commercial alternatives for the various roles and tasks that make our club hum.
Many of these are in well-known roles such as committee members, sub-committee and working group members, directors, teachers, dealers, PPV sellers and kitchen helpers. Others help behind the scenes filling in with unpartnered players, sorting the rubbish, fixing bidding boxes, washing tablecloths, cleaning fans, helping and contributing food on event days and in so many other roles.
We provide many but not all of our volunteers with some tangible thanks, in the form of honorarium payments (such as directors and teachers) and free game vouchers (such as directors, dealers, kitchen helpers, and fill-in players) at a cost of more than $55,000 in 2019 (including $45,000 to directors, $3,400 to dealers and $6,400 to kitchen helpers).
We have compiled a full list of the volunteer roles that make our club run. Please let us know if we have missed any role or mis-stated any details!
Our estimates of the total volunteer time expended (180 hours per week) suggest it is equivalent to five full time employees (or six if you allow for the five taking holidays or being occasionally ill)!
Our biggest volunteer time commitment (about 41%) comes from our director group, followed then by the Committee, the kitchen helpers group and the bridge education group.
Many of these volunteers (representing about 62% of estimated time expended) are offered some form of honorarium, either in the form of free session vouchers or, for some directing and bridge education roles, an honorarium payment.
In 2019 we confirmed with both legal advisers and our insurance brokers that giving these honorariums does not need to cause any compliance or insurance issues for either the club or our volunteers. One of our important guidelines is that any honorarium payment we offer is no more than half the commercial payment rate for the service provided.
The club's practice of offering honorariums has grown over many years in a somewhat fragmented way. It is not surprising that this has resulted in some noticeable inequity with some very significant volunteer roles, such as event conveners, membership and masterpoint secretaries, and those on our committee and sub-committees and working groups and many others, not being offered any honorariums for their often huge commitments of time and effort. The Volunteer Strategy provide us with a base from which to review existing arrangements and move towards more equity over time.
To give you another sense of how much our volunteers contribute to the club, if we were to pay Australia's minimum wage for casual employees for all the volunteer time we receive, it would cost us about $225,000 each year, significantly more than we pay now as honorariums. Covering this additional expense would require about a $5 increase in table money - closer to the levels generally seen at other large bridge clubs.
Not only for financial reasons, we want to use volunteers whenever we can find someone suitable who is prepared to commit to an identified role - and in return we want to support and manage our volunteers professionally. Paying people commercially is an option generally taken only when we are not able to find a suitable volunteer - such as we currently do for cleaning the clubhouse, for catering and kitchen work for our large full-day special events, and for the accounting and administration work needed to support our critical financial and reporting obligations.
Cherishing volunteers is a core part of our culture.
We welcome any feedback on this articulation of our Volunteer Strategy.
