Several years ago I was approached by some friends to help them with a fundraiser for the American Cancer Society.
I had no idea what the Relay For Life was, I had very little information to access to find out what it was, but I took on the task.
It turns out it is a major event, a 24 hour event, that requires nothing less than hundreds of hours of planning and leg work. And, no, this was not a paying job. But that was okay, I already had a couple of those.
I worked tirelessly to put together this event. I tried as hard as I could to recruit volunteers to help out--I went to every health fair, every community event and was on my feet for days at a time getting the information out there so people would get involved. It became my obsession, because both Steve and I had lost loved ones to cancer and I wanted to find a way to help raise money for a cure.
Besides wrangling volunteers, I looked for sponsors, event participants, the equipment needed to put on the event, and I had to find a way each day to motivate the few committee members I had. Those members, volunteers, of course, were dedicated, hard working, competent, and resourceful. I believe there were five of us who put in at least 20 hours each week trying to get everything done. It was exhausting. But we pulled it off.
We had our event in April of 2007 and we raised nearly $80,000. We stayed up all night, entertained the masses, performed little fundraisers, and put out little fires along the way. Some of them were real fires!
We cleaned up the site the next day. I believe we got done around noon. There were very few people who stuck around to do the cleaning, and it was a huge site, we filled the dumpster and actually stacked stuff outside the dumpster.
As usual, there was a follow up meeting where event participants gave their feedback on things. We wrote everything down and vowed to fix what we could.
The next year, we had a couple more committee members, but the work load was still tremendous. We improved the event, we worked our butts off, and we raised $60,000.
Not bad considering we were at the beginnings of a recession.
We moved on to plan the next year's fundraiser. New committee chair (because there's some unwritten rule about a person being chair only for two years)
and unfortunately a new staff partner from American Cancer Society.
These two new people came with their own ideas and we were all willing to serve and get the job done.
But then we started noticing that we weren't being treated very well. And neither were the volunteers we'd worked so hard to recruit. People were being screwed around, ignored, talked about behind their backs, and all the hard work we'd done over the years was minimized and disregarded. I've got thick skin, but what was being done to me was pretty upsetting.
We held on, because we believed in the fundraiser and we knew things would work out. We offered our help and our services whenever we could. We were pushed aside.
We did the jobs we signed up for, we found out that they were saying we weren't doing our jobs.
Then the week of the event arrived. All of a sudden, we were needed. And so were all our resources. We had to fix everything that had been screwed up. We even had to repair relationships with sponsors. We had to pull equipment out of our asses.
And we got nasty treatment still, from the two newcomers in charge.
We stayed after the event and cleaned up, while the two "in charge" stood there with their arms folded watching us and talking.
Not one nice thing to say, certainly not a thank you. Just dirty looks. They actually hindered the clean up.
Here we are, it's time to kick off the fundraising season once again and we all showed up to get signed in. Not a "hello" or anything. Nasty glances. And of course in their speeches they patted themselves on the back for making WAY less money than our core group did in '07 and '08, and they even made an effort to minimize those precious dollars we'd worked so hard to raise.
It's heart breaking, because those of us who would work ourselves to exhaustion to get things done are being left to feel like the red headed step children. And it hurts because it's a fundraiser we believe in.
What do we do? Continue to help out and be criticized behind our backs for all the volunteering? Or do we take a break and wait for these new tirants to get tired and move on to something else they want to ruin?
