After spending days in an anticipation-filled countdown for Sunday June 5, my dreams were somewhat crushed.
Through my school’s involvement with the Youth Volunteer Corps, I had signed up to volunteer at the Calgary Enerflex MS Walk last Sunday. It was supposed to be my first time volunteering at a charity walk/run, and I was really excited to get involved with something so huge and influential. Having never attended a charity walk/run at all, I wanted to experience first-hand the hope and energy that surrounds these types of charity events.
However, to my extreme disappointment, I received a call Sunday morning informing me that my school’s involvement in the walk had been cancelled. The call had been from the YVC committee member at my school who was in charge of organizing and recruiting volunteers as my school’s last volunteer project of the year. She told me that there had been too many volunteers who dropped out (we had a startling total of 3 when we initially had no limit to accepting volunteers), largely due to commitments at church.
This wasn’t the first time that a project had been cancelled on me, so of course I could handle the rejection, but I was looking forward to this one opportunity so much so that I had to convince myself not to go down to Prince’s Island Park and try to volunteer anyway.
This is not to say that I myself have not ever cancelled on a project (my family loves to plan vacations for when I have other obligations), but I was so committed to this one that it was a real-let down.
So, my question is: How heavily does commitment impact volunteering success? Well, I would have to say that it is the #1 thing. It is a direct relationship, if you will. Here is an example of a perfectly great project that fell through due to cancellations by volunteers. I suppose the moral of the story is that if you sign up for something, make sure that you can be loyal to your word, because you never know who else you might impact when you send that “Sorry, it’s my aunt’s birthday” email.