Craft Fair

[jfugina]

I know I've complained before about how difficult it is to find good parent volunteers for the band boosters, and the story is the same no matter what the booster club or situation is. 20% of the people do 80% of the work. And now, in my 5th year of the high school band boosters, I'm right back in the thick of it again. Last year, we literally had no one running for several of our booster board positions. I kind of thought I'd done my time when I served on the board as the Volunteer Coordinator for 2+ years, but now I'm the Vice President. And for lord only knows how long. The Vice President doesn't really have a whole lot of tasks, other than to participate and run monthly association meetings if the president can't be there. But this year, since our lack of volunteers is so very overwhelming, I wound up having to take on our annual craft fair.

On the one hand, it's something I understand. I was a participant several years ago, and worked as a volunteer Nicole's first three years of HS. I never expected to have to run the whole thing though. Our President had to run our marching invitational this year, for exactly the same reason - no one else was willing to do it. Anyway, the event is in December, and instead of doing much of any crafting myself, I'm going to be busy recruiting crafters, and then promoting them on our Craft Fair Facebook page. Communications has been about a 20 hour per week job for the last two months. My focus up to this point is getting all of our booth spaces filled. Past that, I'll need to figure out the logistics of the whole thing. I've got a very small team to help with specific areas, but I still could use about three more people to get this over the finish line. I strongly suspect those three people will all be me.

Anyway... I'll try to check in periodically, but I'm sure I'm going to have my hands completely full. I'm trying to get about 125 total booths filled up, and I'm roughly 80% of the way there. I've got loads to do, and just over a month to get it done. So if you don't hear from me until closer to Christmas, that will be why.

[pamcook]

Good luck - and speaking of luck, they’re very lucky they still have you. Sounds like parents haven’t changed since my volunteer days. 80% of the work is still done by 20% of the parents?

[jfugina]

Thank you, Pam. Sadly, it seems like that's still the case. We did have a good turnout at the marching band competitions this year, with regard to getting parents to help push things onto the field. And several were really good about helping with the meals on-site. And we're thankful for that, but I think a lot of that had to do with missing out last year, and people just wanted to ease their way in with something easy, like showing up on site and saying "what do you want me to do".

But when it comes to anything that requires planning... crickets. It's really a shame. We only have about 80 kids in the band these days, and the number of families that are willing to be involved in anything requiring planning, is well under 10. You've got husband and wife teams, sometimes dragging the band kid's younger siblings behind, doing the vast majority of the work. It's nuts. Between Rob and me, I'm Vice President of the Board, Craft Fair Coordinator, Band Button Coordinator, and tabulation/scoring lead for the invitational; and Rob is one of the trailer haulers, he's the DJ for the Band's Faux-coming dance, and he leads the audio-visual team for the invitational. He's probably going to have to take on an extra role with the craft fair too, just because. On top of that, he's the advancement chair for Jake's scout troop that has about 150 scouts, and turns out a couple of new Eagles every 6 months. So he's pretty much up to his eyeballs in badges and blue cards on any given day. And yes, we both still have full-time jobs and we both like to pretend that we have hobbies.

It seems like the 80/20 rule is universal though. And at the end of it all, I will have zero regrets about the time I put in to this program (and girl scouts before that), because my kids will remember that we were never drive-by parents who would drop of the kid and then forget to pick them up two hours later. I also hope that they get that culture of volunteerism engrained in their being.