[FRC Blog] Making Volunteering for FIRST Even Better

Posted on the FRC Blog, 9/5/2017: Making Volunteering for FIRST Even Better | FIRST

Making Volunteering for FIRST Even Better
Written by Fiona Hanlon, FRC Volunteer Resource Coordinator

Hi FRC Teams and Volunteers,

The Volunteer Resources Department has been hard at work this summer improving many resources to enhance our volunteer’s experience with FIRST. At the *FIRST *Championship events, we held feedback sessions with our volunteers to find out how *FIRST *could improve and one of the things we kept hearing was that the volunteer roles did not accurately represent what the responsibilities were. We took this feedback and revamped the volunteer role descriptions; taking the time to put them in the same format and adding details to make it clearer what the volunteer time commitments are, the role responsibilities, and the minimum experience and skills needed for each role. You can see the updated roles here.

You may notice that all key volunteers now have a minimum age requirement. This is because these roles have a higher level of responsibility. While a minimum age requirement does not guarantee a volunteer is ready to take on a higher level of responsibility, it does help, in the same way having minimum driving and voting ages help ensure people are ready for those significant responsibilities.

We also received helpful feedback over the past few years on how volunteers register with FIRST. You may be happy to hear that our new Volunteer Registration has launched as of August 22nd. We believe this new site will provide a better experience for our volunteers. Volunteer Registration is now accessible under the www.firstinspires.org dashboard. If you previously had a volunteer account, you can use your same username and password to access Volunteer Registration. To access the dashboard, simply go to www.firstinspires.org and click the ‘login’ or ‘sign up’ button in the top right corner of the page. This means team mentors and event volunteers can now log into a single system! FRC events are still not live, but you can login, update your volunteer profile, and see the improvements that have been made. You may notice in the top right corner a number in a red circle, this is indicating action items you have to complete including things like agreeing to our YPP Policies and our Terms & Conditions.

We hope these enhancements improve our volunteers experience and help make our events more consistent for the teams. As always, if you have any volunteer questions please email: [email protected].

Kind of wish they changed the requirement for CSAs and FTAAs* to just be post-high school. I understand where they’re coming from, but if this were in place last year it would have meant I wouldn’t have been able to volunteer as a CSA. I’ll just pass the cutoff by a month this year, but that could have easily been two less year of my volunteer service even though someone else who happened to graduate high school at an older age would have been just fine.

*and others, those are just the ones I care about and looked at

I’m holding a lot back in this reply, but what bugs me the most.

I am in awe that an FTA is 19 (23 preferred) and a VC must be 23.
I know many younger who have AMAZINGLY filled in this role, in fact, much better than their older predecessors.

If I were FIRST Volunteer Staff I’d make the FTA and VC the same req; both run the event in different aspects.

23 is an interesting decision in fact, especially with the expansion of district events and more and more alumni wanting to give back in other ways then mentoring.

Thanks first for locking many people like me from volunteering in positions peers of the same graduating class can take.

For context I am currently 17 (turn 18 in november) and I am a freshman in college. Why couldn’t simply saying 18 and post college age be a sufficient age restriction instead of setting it at 19. Seems pretty ridiculous to me.

Unfortunately this will probably keep me from volunteering this season as im not going to subjected to roles like the safety glass table. Ive reffed 2 offseason events (one being iri) and scorekept another and was really hoping id finally be able to dive into some of the higher responsibility roles at official events this year but I gusss not.

It’s interesting to see that FIRST thinks the difference between a post-high school 18 year old and a post-high school 19 year old is so significant that they’re limited to different jobs. Seems rather arbitrary to me.

It’ll be interesting managing the volunteers in Bison Robotics this year. We’ll have members that turn 19 during the competition season, meaning they’ll be able to serve as a CSA/Referee at Minneapolis, but not at Duluth/Whatever other regional that is seemingly taking forever to officially post.

Our VC has been extremely easy for me to work with in the past, so I’m guessing things will work out!

I wonder how much wiggle room will be afforded to the VCs. The website says

Must be post-high school or equivalent (minimum age of 19 at time of service).
The “must” makes it sound like it will be strictly enforced. Maybe even not let people under age sign up in the new system. I would love to see the VCs get wiggle room to allow under age volunteers (especially if they had volunteered in the role before and are now not allowed).

I’m pretty confident that VC’s will be afforded wiggle room, especially when it comes to students that are on the border. It wouldn’t make sense to disallow one student from the same graduating class as another accepted student purely based on their age. Maturity isn’t directly proportional to age.

Completely agree. Looks like I’ll be confined to CSAing at offseasons for the next two years…

HQ will be the ones doing the wiggling, I think.

Honestly, you want to contact your VC NOW and let them know that “Hey, the new requirements block me from a job I did last year, here’s the info on who to contact to verify if it isn’t you”. Let the VC and RD argue things out with HQ as need be. (See also: grandfather clause)

I agree that a lot of stuff here doesn’t necessarily make a lot of sense, but they’ve been quietly cranking up the requirements since last year. (Last year they changed them mid-volunteer-registration.) I can understand the 19-year-old requirement on the refs (and I think I know where it came from)–they want to be really sure that they don’t have a high schooler on the ref crew.

The 23-year-old requirement for other positions is likely so that they don’t have to replace, replace, replace critical KVs–in a KV role, I think they’re looking for stability, and if college is ~18-22 or so, restricting critical KVs to 23+ means that that person will likely be around for at least a few years instead of leaving the area to go with a company to work elsewhere.

On another note, I was confused by the volunteer login when I checked earlier. I’m now really happy, partly because there doesn’t appear to be a character limit on the “previous experience” box… It is a really clean interface.

Field Reset: “Adults preferred, older teens may be considered”… Rip all the 13 and 14 year old freshmen on so many teams that volunteered for field reset, and did the job competently…

I feel like this may be First’s response to the like very few “horror stories” people had with volunteers. The thought process may be “the older, the more mature and nicer”.

Edit (forgot to add this): “even though all the volunteer negative stories I’ve heard are about older volunteers”.

http://i.imgur.com/ohDKCIO.jpg

I’ve rarely had a negative experience with a young volunteer.

Negative experiences often from older volunteers on power trips.

I forgot to add a sentence to that post, “even though all the volunteer negative stories I’ve heard are about older volunteers”… I thought the sentence in my head, but didn’t write it :joy:. This is what happens when you run 3 all nighters in a row :eek: .

I have generally negative feelings about this, but I’ll wait to see how this is implemented. I’d say VC’s generally know what their event needs better than HQ, so if they’re able to make exceptions to this relatively easily, I suppose it’ll be fine.

The last thing I’d want to do is turn away FIRST alumni from volunteering, especially those in college who don’t necessarily have the time to mentor a team.

This is a step backwards, plain and simple. Never thought FIRST would be in the business of making it harder to volunteer.

If VCs want to restrict younger people from certain positions, they should be able to do so, as they can and have done. Making hard cutoffs that can’t be overridden? I don’t think that was the right way to do this.

I was bored, so I went through all the pages and compiled a list. These are the volunteer roles that don’t have a hard minimum age requirement:

Alumni & Scholarship Attendant
Ambassador
Ambassador Coordinator
Awards Assistant
*Crowd Control
Field Assembly and Disassembly
*Field Repair-Reset
Inspection Manager
*Judge
*Judge Advisor
*Lead Safety Advisor
Lead Safety Glasses Attendant
Machine Shop Attendant
*Machine Shop Staff
Master of Ceremonies Assistant
Practice Field Attendant
*Safety Advisor
Safety Glasses Attendant
Spare Parts Attendant
*Team Load-In/Out Attendant
*Team Load-In/Out Manager
Team Queuing
Team Social Attendant
VIP and Media Check-in Table
Volunteer Lounge Monitor
Volunteer Registration Assistant
Volunteer Registration Supervisor

Roles with a * next to them have a minimum suggested age or say that an adult is preferred if available. Interestingly enough, Judges and Judge Advisors have minimum suggested ages of 25 and 30, respectively, but Judge Assistants have a minimum required age of 19.

I personally don’t believe this was the way to go about this.

Offseasons have proven time and time again that in a pinch you can fill simple roles with people who don’t necessarily need to be trained or be of a specific age, (Safety glasses attendant, etc.) If I were to guess, a dangerous move I know, they did this to lock out a few “bad egg” volunteers who are younger in the community. However, if they didn’t leave wiggle-room to enable those young volunteers who go above and beyond, you functionally are discouraging volunteering and activism, especially in that gap between being on a team and being able to volunteer given these new rules.

I hope this new policy still leaves copious amounts of decision-making capability to the volunteer coordinators, or it may cause serious issues in terms of event staffing, and skilled volunteers. I wait for implementation to judge more harshly, as once again we don’t have all the facts just yet. Only practice and execution will show.

Yep…

I’d had verbal communication with my VCs and current CSAs and was going to be assigned for two events this upcoming season as CSA. However, I’m 17 as of this month (birthday is September 23rd). It’s somewhat frustrating for me because I feel I have the skillset (FTAAing 6 offseason events in the past 2 seasons) but because of my birthday I won’t be able to volunteer in the roles I want until my Sophomore year in college. I guess I missed the fact that my maturity increases tenfold once I turn 19 :rolleyes:.

I think I’ll email FIRST just because of my prior conversations with my VCs but I doubt it’ll change anything.

(Sorry if I came across as rude or passive aggressive, I’ve just had a crappy day without this blog post and I’m feeling a mix of anger and disappointment now.)

While I’m a fan of less limitations, I kind of wish they would of loosely required some sort of FIRST experience for RIs. Inspecting is a tricky role as for many participants it’s the only volunteer they will interact directly with at an event. A poor RI experience can quickly foul a event for it’s participants even if the RI was well intentioned.

While I’m sure there are great RIs without FIRST experience the training and resources necessary to bring them to par with a rookie RI with FIRST experience isn’t always available at a FIRST event and training on the spot particularly at shortened district events can really negatively affect a team’s experience. I would prefer to have a rookie RI who is under 19 with strong FIRST experience over a 65 year old rocket scientist without FIRST experience any day of the week.