Opinion: Thank a Volunteer Before You Need One

Volunteer institutions run on a renewable resource: the willingness of people to keep showing up. Thank them while the contribution is ongoing, not after it stops.

It is a strange feature of community life that the cleanup that does not happen, the event that quietly folds, the committee with no one left to run it, are how we register the people who held those things together. By then the thanks comes too late, addressed to a contribution that has already ended.

The unpaid labor is not abstract. The East Isles Neighborhood Association won an MWMO community grant to run Adopt-a-Drain across East Isles and the Wedge, where residents are asked to clear a storm drain twice a month so leaves and trash stay out of the lakes. The Lowry Hill East association has run monthly cleanups from April through November that pulled hundreds of pounds of trash off neighborhood streets and parks. Add the PTA parents folding chairs at Kenwood and the organizers who give up weekends so the rest of us show up to a finished event, and you have a great deal of work that appears on no budget and in almost none of our gratitude until it stops.

Here is the specific argument: that willingness to keep showing up is sustained partly by feeling valued, and it is depleted by being taken for granted. The Adopt-a-Drain resident who clears a drain twice a month, the cleanup volunteer who returns every month for eight months, do so without pay and largely without notice. When the notice never comes, the renewal does not either, and the program that depended on them quietly contracts, one unthanked Saturday at a time.

Some associations hold annual recognition events, and they should. But the formal thanks of an organization is no substitute for the informal thanks of a neighbor: the word at the curb, the note, the simple acknowledgment that someone noticed the hours you gave. That kind of gratitude costs nothing and is in chronically short supply. So thank them now, while the contribution is ongoing and the thanks can still land. Thank the room parent, the drain adopter, the person with the clipboard.