Volunteering and Offerings

Mad Camp is 100% volunteer! Volunteers and organizers all have equal standing with scholarships, lodging, ticketing and even the lottery. We are all paying to to be at Mad Camp.

We need people to help plan and make Mad Camp happen //now//.

We are looking for organizers / planners / prep people. As well as people who can bring offerings for the schedule of events day to day. Have a group exercise you want to offer? An art activity? An instrument you want to bring for a sing along? BRING IT! **Let us know** A lot of people show up at Mad Camp and then get inspired on the spot to offer something, a class or workshop, so you’ll have that opportunity, you don’t need to decide something before coming.

Hmm, is volunteering that simple? What to know about volunteering

Here’s the thing about volunteering – projects are complicated and volunteering can sometimes make things more complicated.

A good rule of thumb is – if you are waiting for someone to tell you what to do, then you might not be a volunteer, you might be a reverse volunteer – you just added work! We might now have the added task of managing you, communicating with you, tracking your email…

Oh no!

Here’s what you should do if you want to volunteer – think for yourself, do something, then tell us what you did.

Volunteering means taking initiative and responsibility, and a quick look at this site will give you MANY ideas on how to volunteer. MANY. Also at camp you will see MANY things you can do. Use your own creative thinking and give yourself inner permission.

SO if you email us and say “I want to volunteer what should I do?” you might have just reverse-volunteered and are now asking someone else to do an additional task!

Solution?

Do something. Then – email us telling us what you already did.

For example:

“Dear Mad Camp, I want to volunteer, please get in touch.” Means we now have extra work to track you, phone you, manage you, and you just created more work that hasn’t gotten done yet.

But consider this:

“Dear Mad Camp, I shared the donation link on my social media profile, I donated $5 personally, I announced Mad Camp at my peer support group last night, I selected 3 books to bring to the Mad Library, and I got my snorkel out of storage to bring to camp for some pool fun. Let me know what else I can do to help.”

or

“Dear Mad Camp, I thought it would be cool to design some simple 1×1 mad camp badges for people to put on Instagram I posted mine here and I can help with more if people want, have people email me or direct message me on Instagram”

Wow, you’re a volunteer! You made stuff happen rather than created more tasks that didn’t get done yet. You showed you can get stuff done, and now we have a feeling we can spend some time on next steps awith you – and the net result will be accomplishing things not adding work that doesn’t get done. You showed you have a track record.

Here’s another great example of what we’d love to hear:

“Dear Mad Camp, I saw there is a need for t-shirts, I just made a list of places we can buy ink, and I asked my friend who might have a screen frame that I can bring. Let me know if this is helpful and next steps and put me in touch with the other t-shirt crew.“

Awesome!

or

“Dear Mad Camp, I have awesome spreadsheet tracking skills, I just made a sheet I am sharing that lists where we can post/send the announcement that applications are open, it’s a bunch of cool mental health websites and groups and forums. I just need someone to write a press release and I can start posting and getting other people to post.”

Super awesome!

Get the idea?

There are of course many times when “What can I do?” or “How can I help?” goes really well – the morning of setup, for example. So these are just ideas, Sometimes we can do task hand offs and delegate stuff that is really simple, like this:

“Ok I want to help what can I do?”

“Great, recruit 4 people to move the sofas all along that far wall.”

Simple!

Or

“Hey need any help?”

“Ah you are a heart person, can you go check in on ___ they seemed like they might want someone to talk to, not sure just check it out, maybe they don’t!

Also simple.

Or this one:

“Dear Mad Camp I want to volunteer what can I do?”

“Great, what do you want to do?”

“Well I can post the announcement on social media in a bunch of places and make a fundraising pitch at my Hearing Voices group meeting tonight, and then get back to you when I do and report how it went, how about that?”

Great!

You’d be amazed at how many people don’t even think to post the Mad Camp annoucement on social media – it is a BIG help to get the word out about Mad Camp! And also post the donation link!

More ideas about volunteering:

Sometimes tasks gets bottlenecked. A classic one is this:

“Hey I made a Mad Camp website, here it is!”

“Great, we put that site out on social media and posters and people are starting to visit it, can you give us the password and admin access in case you disappear?”

And they disappear. Now we have to create a new website and deal with the people who go to the old one – they just reverse volunteered (created more work with no net gain) PLUS they did the dreaded bottleneck trap where a volunteer not only doesn’t get stuff done, but prevents other people from doing things because now we are waiting for them, stuff that would happen if they hadn’t volunteered in the first place! Happens a LOT people!

This is not to dunk on people’s good intentions. THANKS for trying. It’s also not to be unrealistic about wellness and people’s needs – it’s ok to drop stuff when you are not doing well, we all do this. But it is to point out that this kind of project is a LOT of work and VERY CHALLENGING at times – if you don’t have experience you may not understand the enormous complexity that can come from “I want to help” and what you are getting into if people start relying on things and there is no Plan B.

So if you want to volunteer, think of something to do, do it, and then email us and we’ll go from there!

Here’s another thing about volunteering – it is hard to say no!

So if you say you want to volunteer, and we say “Great, can you pick up this person at the airport” and you say yes… but then you don’t do it, they are stranded. Much better to say “No, I don’t have a car!”

Ok that’s kind of an obvious example, but it happens all the time – don’t say Yes unless you mean Yes, It’s ok to say No! And it’s ok if your Yes now becomes a No later – just tell someone! Hand off the task. Or you risk becoming a bottleneck. You can also say No and offer an alternative suggestion on how to help, “Mmm, no that’s not what I’m best at, how about I do something else that doesn’t involve draiving, for example I love to make posters, do we need any posters for announcements or anythng?”

And here’s the other thing about volunteering – we are volunteers too! We flake out, we get overcommitted, we forget things, we get disorganized… we even reverse volunteer and bottleneck ourselves (a lot!!!!). So you can help us out by pointing out when we are losing the plot and things are confusing. Let’s all work together to make volunteering sustainable and effective for everyone.

~ The Mad Camp Crew