I recently became involved with the New York Volunteering Meetup.  After my first meeting, I was most interested in the range of involvement of participants.  First of all, group membership is around 275, but each meeting generally brings in less than 15 folks.  Secondly, it seemed some attendees came ready to sign up to serve, others were explaining their causes, and others wanted to share what they’ve done in the past or just meet like minded people.  Engaging everyone, or harnessing their energy, towards the same causes doesn’t seem easy.

Thinking of our group here at Bug Labs …. the avid cyclists in our office all took interest in volunteering their time to serve as guides for the Transportation Alternatives bike ride – which involved waking up at the crack of dawn on a Saturday.   More recently, Heather, Bug Labs’ Queen of QA, signed on to be a buddy to an elderly New Yorker as part of the Caring Community program.   I think we are all passionate and giving, but it’s easy to see that if you want to volunteer and get involved – it’s personal.

As we plan our next Volunteer Meetup, I’m thinking about how we can create meaning for the entire  group.  How can you create involvement, or better yet, continued interest?   I mean, there are 275 people that went out of their way to join the Meetup, but don’t seem to be active.

Allison Fine, in her book Momentum, takes a good deal of time to explain the parallels of community involvement and open source programming.   I thought this ironic as Bug Labs is all about open source, and I had never related it to volunteering, or giving back to the community.  How naive!  That’s what open source is.  In the open source software community, people contribute their ideas and they can participate how they want to.  Power flows from people who self-organize.  While this may seem chaotic, when it is managed well (like all good open source projects) a diffuse network of builders all interested in creating a better whole, make amazing progress.  The Meetup forum itself, is a great example of open source collaboration.  It provides an organized format for people to create and contribute based on the very topics that are of interest to them.

Perhaps applying this philosophy down one more level, into our own Volunteer Meetup group, has some value?   Maybe we could facilitate the posting of causes, as well as make it easier for those wanting to give their time and expertise.  This could allow people to be active in just the way they want.   Have you volunteered and enjoyed it?  What made it a good or bad experience?  Would you participate more if it was more related to a specific cause or if it was easier?  What makes it easier for you?

On our trip to Bug+ Boston the team wanted to
contribute a bit of our elbow grease to help out in the community.  We came across a great organization, called Pine Street Inn , who was willing to let us park our rented RV in their lot and teach us what goes into feeding the hungry.

I think ‘volunteering’ doesn’t generally come across as a fun word – especially after a long night of Bug+ing.  But we had a blast.  We cracked hundreds of eggs, mixed hundreds of pounds of ground beef with our hands (in sanitary gloves, of course), delicately arranged hundreds of lasagna noodles, and wrapped hundreds of sandwiches.  All told, I would guess our small team prepared a big 1,700 meals or so. Where we generally spend our mental efforts on issues like configuration compatibility and making sure a service tracker doesn’t interfere with application code, we suddenly found ourselves focused on the very different, bigger, but simpler task of feeding and distributing thousands of meals.

We knew Pine Street Inn had a great cafeteria service for all who came in, and that they had a night outreach program to bring food to the hungry.  We didn’t know Pine Street was a big, efficient, and caring powerhouse firing on all cylinders (unlike the motorhome), allowing homeless people to secure permanent housing and get on the path to self-sufficiency.   We saw a clean and welcoming emergency shelter where 700 individuals sleep every night – which includes the largest shelter and resource for women in New England.   There was medical and psychiatric services, job training, literacy programs, work programs, elder programs, and outreach teams bringing food, clothing, blankets, medical assistance, and compassion to streets every night.

I don’t know how all this gets done.   Obviously, it takes tons of activity, energy, resources, passion, and compassion.  What would happen if places like Pine Street Inn didn’t exist?  How can we be more
involved in our communities?   I think I can speak for us all when I say that spending a few hours at Pine Street allowed a glimpse at the bigger (more real) world that we tend to forget about when we are
living our lives.