This is an interesting and important thread.  Thus far, responses have
come from the public sector; institutional personel or students.
 
I would like to add a note from an employer.  For over a dozen years I
employed upwards of 5 staff members.  There were always volunteers.  Some
bright-eyed and awestruck and some damned serious about something or other.
 
In all those years, I offered employment to two volunteers.  One accepted
employment.
 
The other remained a volunteer for a decade or so.
 
The volunteers who stick, and who do a good job year after year, are
typically retired people.  If they are drawn to conservation they have a
set of attitudes which work well at the bench.  They are interested in
continuing education and have hand/tool skills developed in previous work
which are applicable.
 
Over the years, there have been interns from various university programs
who were interested in short-term, defined-goal projects and needed to
acquire certain skills, and those people were accomodated in the lab.
 
There have been some people who wanted to augment skills, and that was good.
 
But, in the main, I preferred to put people on the payroll.  There were
two main reasons for that.
 
If I believed that they were capable of being trained to work on a
client's property, then they were worth a salary.
 
If they did not perform up to a certain standard, it was easier to
reprimand and educate an employee than a volunteer.
 
I realize that volunteers are part of the life blood of a non-profit
institution.  What I whould like to see is a statistic comparing the
number of young, energetic, bright-eyed volunteers with the number of
salaried museum employees drawn from those ranks.
 
After many years of employing staff, the day came when I realized that I
was paying half of an annual salary to a person who filled out forms for
various city, county, state, and federal agencies, and that I was
spending a fair amount of my time reviewing those forms before signing
them and signing the checks which always accompanied them.
 
Just another data point
 
Jack C.Thompson
Thompson Conservation Lab
Portland, OR
 
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