I've been a non-profit "administrator" guy - and I did volunteer.

Guess what happened?

It was a nightmare.

Work times varied between 40 and 80 hours a week (I'm not exaggerating, there were day shifts and evening shifts and I often covered both). If someone else was off sick or on holiday, I often had to cover for them.

There were zero weeks off, because we were running all through the year.

Less involved people had nice things like holidays. But not muggins administrator here.

Just like a startup, in smaller non-profits you have to wear a lot of hats. There aren't enough people to specialise in all the things that need doing.

Even when there are plenty of people, most of them won't put in enough hours, and the quality of those hours is, how shall we say, "variable". It's a thing that comes up in volunteer organisations in particular.

Volunteers tend to think they're being generous when they put in, say, a 5 hour shift. And they are being generous. But unfortunately, because of the needs served by the organisation, a comfortable donation of time is often small compared with what's needed. Variable-time volunteers like to spend much of their time goofing off as well. Like it's sort of a job, and sort of a fun day out.

To rub it in, they tend to think the work done by someone else doesn't really need doing, or is done much slower than they would do themselves. Even though they have no idea what's really involved, and their eyes glaze over if you try to describe it all, and they don't believe you anyway. If you've worked in a software dev shop, you may recognise the type: A project that took 1000 person-hours to produce will be assessed by someone as "a couple of hours". Sometimes they're right, usually not.

So they "suggest" how to do it better, often in public forums, except you can't figure out any way to usefully apply their suggestion that doesn't create more work in the end, or infringe someone's data privacy, or fail to deliver what some sponsor expects for their money, or fails a legal requirement, or it's just plain nonsense, or etc. (longer rant available on request). People talk a lot of shit.

But you acknowledge you don't know everything, so you delegate to them a task, hoping they will build up responsibilities over time, without failing in your responsibilities in the process. (For example you can't just hand over a bunch of people's personal data, or a box of cash, or the keys to dangerous machine, to a keen volunteer-for-the-day just because they want to help.)

So you give them a useful but quite easy task, and they do a half-assed job of even that, and quit half way anyway ("I have to go home now, sorry man, I gotta leave the rest to you to finish off"). Then you're stuck staying late while the other volunteers have gone home, or have gone to the pub for a drink because they had enough fun contributing for the day.

Then people wonder why they don't see you at the social events, and think you're not really engaged with the organisation. Little do they know, and it doesn't register if you tell them anyway, that the reason you're not at the pub is because you're doing the damn record-keeping and box-moving and tool-operating that they're dimly aware exists, but somehow forget that it adds up.

The end result: Being a volunteer administrator at that scale and level of responsibility is very expensive for the poor fool who makes the initial commitment!

I went from good, comfortable savings, to struggling to pay houshold bills, because it wasn't possible to do enough paid work at the same time. It costs a lot of money to be a volunteer.

Naturally, some would "suggest" that paid work should take priority. But they didn't actually help make that possible; instead, the same people tended to add to the workload, by adding meetings instead of useful assistance. A few people offered assistance and were genuinely, awesomely, helpful. (Massive thank you - you probably know who you are.) A few others, though, offered "assistance" which was of negative help (i.e. created more net work), and seemed to be all about improving their social status instead (democratic organisations can suffer from this).

It's not actually possible to walk away from a high-responsibility volunteer position, while being responsible about it, since doing so risks seriously jeopardising the work of the organisation.