So many volunteers, so little staff

Members are Sierra Club's greatest resource; staff's role is to help them

In the Bay Chapter, volunteers make most of the decisions and perform most of the work. So who are the paid staff? What is their job?

The short answer is that staff's role is to assist and support our members and volunteers. Staff do things that help members to be involved, and that members can't conveniently or reasonably do. The long answer, of course, is a little more complicated.

In the Bay Chapter we divide staff responsibilities into three major categories: Member Services, Fundraising, and Conservation. All of our staff have some involvement in each of these areas, but each has a more specialized role.

Member Services includes much of the work involved in communicating with our 42,000 members and the public about our outings and our conservation programs. This includes opening up the office each day, answering mail and phone calls, producing the Yodeler, and maintaining our Chapter web site.

Fundraising staff raises the money to pay the bills. Two-thirds of all Chapter income comes from over 9,000 individual contributions each year - most in direct response to a call from our Membership Outreach team. These staff are also responsible for timely and accurate processing of every contribution. Unlike most organizations, we can take pride that our outreach staff also deliver important conservation messages and take active part in our conservation efforts.

Conservation, of course, is the heart of the Chapter's mission. The Conservation staff work closely with volunteer leaders helping them to plan, coordinate, and implement our conservation agenda. In a Chapter with over 4,000 conservation actions last year, staff recognizes that our time is best spent providing the tools, assistance, and professional expertise that enable our volunteers to get the job done.

The core of the staff mission is performing tasks that are unreasonable to expect of volunteers. Office volunteers spend thousands of hours each year helping with our administrative systems and maintaining our database, but most volunteer for three to four hours a week, and need the help of full-time staff to manage the systems. Most conservation volunteers can only help with three to four hours at a time; full-time staff are needed to help create and organize the structure that allows our volunteers to spend their time efficiently and effectively.

Our San Francisco Bay Chapter staff is dedicated and motivated. Several of them started out in the Sierra Club with many years of volunteering. Others are young people starting out their careers in a job that makes a difference. Each has made the conscious choice to work here. They bring a true professional sense of responsibility to their work.

It is the combination of our Chapter members and volunteers - who give money, talk to their neighbors, lobby our legislators, and help with the thousand and one administrative tasks - with the leavening of our few staffpeople, that makes all of our successes possible.

Michael Bornstein, senior Chapter director