Celebrate Your Volunteers!

Today is one of my favorite days!  No, not St. Patrick's Day (though that is a great day as well!).  It's Hillcrest's Annual Volunteer Appreciation Event.  We've done this event several years now, and it's a fun event we throw for our church's volunteers.  There's a meal at the Pizza Ranch, gift cards for the kids to use at the Pizza Ranch's arcade, and all kinds of sweet prizes (Starbucks cards, Movie tickets, and free oil changes to name a few) for our awesome volunteers.  And everything is free.  It'll cost us well over a thousand dollars to pull off the event, but we look at it as an investment in people, not as the total cost.

Here's the thing- to be a volunteer means to give of your time without a tangible reward.  If you get a tangible reward for your time, you've moved from being a volunteer to being an employee!

Volunteers often receive intangible rewards- the smile of a child, the note from a teacher, the text from a student, the postcard from a leader, but it is also important to celebrate volunteers with tangible rewards- a gift card, a lunch out, a public recognition.

If you work with volunteers, how can you celebrate them?