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Volunteerism at HTS - Wendy Fursey
The following presentation has been edited for website publication.
April 23, 2003 (presented to visiting Australian Heads of School)
Holy Trinity School is still a very young school at 21 years of age, so Volunteerism at HTS is still a constantly evolving process. Our relative youth in the independent school system gives us something of an advantage in this evolution, because we are not bound as much by tradition, and therefore we are constantly dreaming up new schemes and ideas to test. It keeps us thinking and interested in what we are doing. It is also more fun to be creative.
When HTS started in September of 1981 in the basement of Holy Trinity Church in Thornhill, there were 66 students from 60 families, a Headmaster and 5 teachers. The first volunteer effort took place that Christmas in the form of a Christmas luncheon for the students and faculty. Over the course of the next 3 years as the student body swelled to 150 students and changed location, the parent volunteers formed a Parent Support Association and in this short period parent volunteers were organizing carpooling (no mean feat before the minivan and answering machines), hot dog days, bake sales, Birthday book programme, social ’teas’, uniform exchange, lost and found, and special tasks as the need arose. At one point volunteer mom’s manned the phones when there was no school secretary. Another time they cooked hotdogs in the Church kitchen and drove the individually wrapped hotdogs to the temporary school location 15 minutes away. These keen efforts are probably fairly typical of a small, enthusiastic, parent network.
Over the years the Parent Support Association was changed to the Parents’ Guild, a constitution was written, and rewritten again recently. The student body is now over 700 students with approximately 470 families. Some of the biggest changes have occurred in the past 4-6 years. The Parents’ Guild structure went from a horizontal organization where everyone who had leadership responsibilities dealt directly with the President to an organization with a corporate type structure that has 4 Vice Presidents who share the load with the President.
Today (2003) our Parents’ Guild Executive organizes the magazine campaign fundraiser, the Christmas Country Store, small one-off fundraisers, Sundaes on Thursday (where the PG gives all students in the school an ice cream sundae with all the bells and whistles for free), grade parents, the Family Mentor Programme, library volunteers, library Birthday book programme, lost and found, hospitality for school sporting events, hospitality for school music events, volunteers for the lunch milk programme, Christmas carol service, Junior school Christmas luncheon, First Communion and Confirmation reception, weekly pizza lunches, the annual spring luncheon, all things related to our school shop from ’cradle to grave’, a new parents’ tea, the Used Textbook Sale, a once per term Parents’ Guild publication, and we have a team of volunteers just to keep track of the volunteers, and a team of volunteers to keep track of the finances. For the last 3 years we have tracked our rate of volunteerism, and we have found that we have over 300 parent volunteers doing something here at HTS. This is a rate that we are very proud of.
A few years ago we recognized that our biggest and most important asset was our volunteer base. How do we keep our ’gold mine’ of volunteers happy, satisfied, and energized? I think we have been enormously successful in this area and we did it in a number of ways. We first created a VP whose sole responsibility was finding volunteers for jobs, matching the right volunteer with the skills required, and tracking the number of areas each volunteer was involved in which did wonders in avoiding ’volunteer burn-out’. We still haven’t figured out how to tell a keen volunteer they have done too much and should step back, but many of those people figured it out. Next we published a Volunteer Opportunity Handbook that gives a brief description of all the volunteer jobs at HTS. This handbook has evolved in the 4 years since we have been printing it into a fully universal directory of volunteer opportunities at HTS. And by that we mean that any faculty organized volunteers (reading moms, field trip parents, etc.), and Development office volunteers (Gala, Golf Classic, etc.) are also included. I think the only volunteer job that is not included is the Board of Governors, (and all the Board’s sub-committees). When it comes to parent volunteers we should be seemless, because most parents don’t really understand the difference between the Parents’ Guild, the Board of Governors, and the Development Office. Finally, we have sooo much fun that people just want to be around us. We are more about raising friends than raising funds.
Our Parents’ Guild is a fairly independent organization. Although we enjoy a unique freedom that not many other Parents’ Guilds are afforded, everything we do is still cleared by the Head of School. For the ongoing, annual events, programmes, this is understood and we continue on our merry way. For anything new, the PG President works with the Head of School first, then directs the relevant team to work with the Director of Development (eg. special events), the Director of Finance (eg. legal questions and insurance), the Director of Administration (eg. Communication with the parents, and other administrative questions), the Director of Admission (eg.Family Mentor Programme), and the Assistant Head (eg. calendar planning), to iron out the details. We have a Parents’ Guild representative who sits on the Board of Governors and communicates happenings and initiatives as they arrive. This representative also reports items that are not sensitive in nature back to the Parents’ Guild from the Board of Governors. Other than this, the Board and Parents’ Guild have no formal interaction except through the Head of School. The Board is the future whereas the Parents’ Guild is today.
In recent years, the original focus on fund raising has been transforming to more of a “goodwill ambassador” focus. This has been a fun transition for many of us, because this means more friend raising, and friend raising means more HTS community spirited events aimed at just having fun. We still make money—which is still climbing, even though that is not our focus—and it is donated back to the school for specific items on the Head’s wish list.
One final thing. An organization was established in 1989 called the Interguild. The Interguild is made up of approximately 40 independent schools from across Ontario and it was established as a way to share and exchange ideas. It is through this exchange of ideas that has resulted in the introduction of a couple of new programmes, and other schools have benefited from information on our Family Mentor Programme and our Volunteer Opportunity Handbook. The Interguild has an Executive, and a representative from each member school attends their monthly meetings. Recently we have found it beneficial to also share speaker dates, and upcoming events in an attempt to help each other get the word out. It is slowly becoming an important tool for all of the member schools. It is also through the Interguild that we are starting to fully appreciate the work that we do at Holy Trinity School, and realize just how successful and forward thinking an organization we have become…. And modest too!
Wendy Fursey
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