FAITH IN VOLUNTEERING

SCENARIO

For use as a small group exercise to explore some relevant issues around volunteering in faith based social action projects.

Rev. Gloria Mundey is the vicar of St. Cuthbert by the Gasworks, and inner city parish of the Church of England. The congregation of about 50 members is multiracial, but mainly female and elderly. The church building is also used on Sunday afternoons by the Glorious Resurrection Tabernacle, a large, lively and mainly young African Pentecostal congregation. 100 yards down the street is the local Sikh gurudwara.

For several years St Cuthberts has been an active member of the local winter nightshelter project, which is managed by a large voluntary organisation (ABC) which was originally set up by a group of local churches. Every Friday night about 30 homeless people sleep in St Cuthberts Church Hall and are given evening meal and breakfast. Church volunteers do all the cooking, serving and welcoming as well as organising the rotas, while one paid member of staff (with some very basic social work qualifications) sleeps over. This year volunteers are in very short supply as one key lady has died and another has moved away. Rev. Gloria thinks she has solved the problem as she has recruited six members of the GRT church to go on the welcoming rota and the gurudwara have agreed to cook and deliver food for 30 people every second week.

However 3 weeks into the winter season Gloria is having to deal with these complaints:

1. Gladys Skinner the church organist came in on Saturday to practice the hymns for Sunday and couldn't bear "the smell of all that foreign food" and thought that the place had been left in a terrible mess.. Last year when her late lamented friend Doris had been in charge of the team she always made sure "our church" was left in a decent state. If it doesn't get better she says she will resign and join the Methodist Chapel.
2. The manager of ABC has phone Gloria to say he has received a complaint from one of the night shelter users that one of the African volunteers had spent two hours trying to "save his soul" and had given him "fundamentalist" Christian literature. He hadn't been able to eat the spicy food either.
3. The secretary of the gurudwara has phoned to say that when half a dozen young people from the Sikh Youth Movement came to deliver the food last week, two of the boys were approached by a young man (probably a user of the night shelter) and offered drugs. He is sure that if this happens again parents will stop allowing their teenagers to volunteer for this work.

Discuss:

How should Rev. Gloria handle each of these issue short term?

What procedures /policies could be set up to prevent these type of incidents happening and ensuring the best appropriate deployment and retention of volunteers?