Shittiest job in the world done by a bunch of nice people who only want the best for kids, and then get shit on by useless parents. I've run dozens of volunteer organizations, and know first hand that getting someone to volunteer is the finest way to drive a person from the community forever. You work your ass off - in your spare time - to try and address the problems you can reach, and get nothing but hate from the community. Made up bullshit. Misinterpretations of actions. Lies. Political bullshit. Whatever. Eventually you will discover the community you loved and wanted to help is actually a collection of complete fucktards who don't deserve even a moment of your attention or time. No matter what the organization does, the people who step up to do the real work will be lambasted and demonized until they leave. Every single time.
Urgh this rings way too true. I've witnessed this happen too many times in the past few years, since getting involved in the BM community, a makerspace and starting our own plastic recycling non-profit. Even if you don't get demonized, you just start sinking hours into a volunteering black hole with no-one helping. So then you sink more hours into recruiting people to help, to find out they ghost the organisation immediately and you're back to doing everything. It really sucks, because I hate how everything these days is so transactional. But if there is no exchange of money, people have no qualms about wasting your time or not appreciating your work. Value is seen in monetary terms, and your volunteering time is judged worthless by outsiders, while feeling entitled - maybe because they assume you get an immense amount of satisfaction from it? It's been especially hard in Covid times, because now people are left with only the boring remote work side of things, without the social aspect (beer after a meeting/organizers cookout / whatever) that redeemed the thanklessness a little.
Thanks for bringing up your experiences, too. Everyone that starts a volunteer-run organization, or who heavily uses volunteers, loves the idea so much. But then humans get involved and bring the whole thing to a grinding halt in petty bickering. There's something to learn there, but not many organizations have figured it out yet.