With Town Meetings almost upon us, lots of folks across Vermont are thinking about volunteers. Towns need volunteers, lots of them. The list of where towns need volunteers seems almost endless: library trustees, electric department commissioners, planning commissions and development review boards, town energy committees, and quite recently, equity committees have rightly been added.
Surveyors of wood, bark and lumber, or cemetery trustees and constables, might not have a lot to do. Others have plenty to do. Select boards and school boards depend on hard working volunteers meeting regularly. Sometimes volunteers must respond with a moment’s notice; think fire departments and dog wardens.
Most towns manage to fill all of those positions most of the time.
I’ve heard some town officials bemoaning the lack of volunteers to fill positions while reporting on town meetings this year. Some town ballots have no names next to open select board seats. That’s clearly a problem and one that doesn’t have easy solutions.
Individuals and families, on average, need to work longer days than their counterparts a generation or two ago. More young people in Vermont now leave the state for work when their education is complete than they did a generation ago. Whether that education is high school, trade school, community college, or at a university, more young people leave to seek their fortune elsewhere.
There are many more things to occupy our time than there were in the past.
Radio has been around for about 130 years and in more than half of American homes for about 90 of them. Television has been around for those same 90 years, but only common in homes for 60. The internet was invented 40 years ago, but the iPhone came along in just the last 16. Only in the last 10 years have more than 50% of Americans had a mobile phone.
How have those changes made the lives of people in this part of Vermont different over the last two or three generations?
Despite all those changes creating distractions that vie for our attention, I’m amazed at the number of volunteers I come across as I go about my day.
Today, people were picking up food in Greensboro to deliver as Meals on Wheels volunteers. Yesterday a group of Neighbor to Neighbor volunteers in Hardwick made a meal and served it to people volunteering to share their experiences from this past summer’s flooding to help develop better responses for future disasters. A few days earlier I had lunch at a community meal produced mostly by high school students. During a normal week I see volunteers at thrift stores and volunteers teaching health and wellness classes for tai chi, for yoga, and for exercise.
There’s apparently no lack of people volunteering and almost all of them seem happy to be doing the work they’re doing. People who volunteer feel better about themselves. Volunteer activities they take on help others.
There are plenty of volunteer opportunities available to you with town meeting almost here. There are plenty more opportunities that select boards will appoint people to in the months following town meeting.
Some volunteer to be community journalists here at The Gazette. You could too.
There are other opportunities at libraries, food shelves, and other nonprofits that benefit our communities in dozens of ways.
Try one, you might like it. You might feel better about yourself, and you most certainly will be helping others who need that help.
by Paul Fixx, editor
Paul Fixx is editor of The Hardwick Gazette and lives in Hardwick.
