Current Districts Map. Who is next?

[Jon Stratis]

Originally Posted by KrazyCarl92

This excuse about different regions not having enough volunteers to go to districts is silly. Having just moved to Southwestern Ohio, I begin to think about where I would volunteer at events if I choose to. Why would I volunteer at an Ohio event and take 2 days off from work when I could take 1 day off and volunteer at a district event in Indiana? If I have to use personal vacation time, quite simply I wouldn't.

In each of these regions that claim to "not have enough volunteers" there are plenty of people for which the marginal difference between 2 vacation days vs. 0 or 1 vacation days to volunteer at an event is a significant difference. So by going to districts more people will choose to volunteer. And I'm aware this isn't the case for everyone, but Saturday-Sunday district events would make the choice to volunteer very easy for me.



Where do I sign up to volunteer?

The issue isn't a "number of bodies" thing - switching formats means reducing the number of vacation days and (hopefully) decreasing travel distance to events. The problem is the number of experienced and trained Key Volunteers. I don't care how many new volunteers you get, you can't take someone with no experience and make them an LRI, Head Ref, or FTA overnight. It takes experience at events and some amount of training from people already in those roles before you can step up.

Plus, most volunteers get signed up in VIMS and committed in the December-February time frame... I know myself and the other MN LRI's were asked to commit last month for specific events this upcoming season - that's at least 6 months in advance, if not more. It's hard to find that level of commitment, to find people willing to commit for events well before their teams has even decided where it's going.

If MN had switched to districts 2 years ago, I would have been asked to be LRI at an event every weekend. As it stands now, I've been able to recruit enough other LRI's that I would only need to do 3 district events this year (and with the other identified LRI's we're starting training plans for, pretty soon that will be reduced to 2, even if the number of potential district events increases). Other Key Volunteer positions aren't in as good of shape here, not yet.