Volunteer effort

[Red Adder]

To avoid worrying about how England may cock it up in Ukraine this evening I thought I'd spend the afternoon worrying about money - or the amount of value volunteers put in to the sport each year.

Baseing it my small club and at £ 12 an hour (equivalent roughly to average wage) and covering mapping, event holding (3 cat C, 6 cat D), club management, coaching and support for regional activities I reckon at least £ 35 k of volunteer effort is put foward each year (and I may well be under estimating the input of others in the roles I don't contribute to). I imagine for a more typical club with a higher membership and activity levels the figure is likely to be £ 70 k pa. There are about 100 clubs. Add in support of all the national activities and events and I doubt whether the value of volunteer effort is less than £ 8 m pa, and quite possibly nearer £ 9 m.

Best not tell the chancellor or he'll try to come up of a way to get his cut.

[aiming off]

And that is exactly why the volunteers/membership, not the Government, should have the dominant say in the direction the sport is taken by BOF.

[PhilJ]

Some other info: for one of the prospective JK areas the landowners have said that they will provide car parking officials (we have no choice on the matter) but there is a cost:
"staff an event of approx 1000 participants with an additional 6 staff (at £10 each per hour), and they’d normally be on site for approx 4-6 hours."
So extrapolating that is 18 staff X 6 hours = 108hrs * £10.00 = £1,080.00 for car parking officials.

Just wonder how many hours/volunteers do car parking every week at every event for zip.....no event would turn a surplus if volunteers charged for their time at commercial rates.

[ricardito]

Just wonder how many hours/volunteers do car parking every week at every event for zip...

Well, you could think in terms of at least 5-10 man hours, allowing 2 to 4 people on duty at any time (depending on the nature of the venue, leaflets/slips to hand out, charges to collect, etc).

And that doesn't necessarily include extras like hanging/collecting road signs or marshalling road crossings.

...no event would turn a surplus if volunteers charged for their time at commercial rates.

... unless participants were prepared to pay entry fees that reflected the "commercial" cost of the manpower required. Which I presume is the case with a lot of the "not-quite-O" events that are discussed in this forum from time to time.