The Pain, Pleasure & Importance of Volunteering

Part One of The Final Chapter — stories, memories and reflections from nearly twenty years behind Scotfest.

By Steve Campbell, Chairman and Former Executive Director

In July 2007, I volunteered to help save a Scottish festival.

That sounds considerably more dramatic in hindsight than it felt at the time.

Scotfest was in trouble. The previous year's event had lost a significant amount of money relative to its size, the organization was carrying substantial debt, that year's festival was only about two months away, and very little of the work required to actually put it on had been done.

There was serious discussion about whether it should happen at all.

One suggestion was effectively to walk away from the venue, the debt and perhaps the event itself.

I couldn't accept that.

Partly because I didn't think it was honorable to walk away from money that was owed.

Partly because I thought that if your solution to financial problems was simply to walk away from whoever you owed money to, eventually you would run out of parks willing to let you hold a festival.

And partly, if I'm completely truthful, because as someone born and raised in Scotland, I looked at the festival and thought we could do better.

So I volunteered to become Treasurer.

I thought I was volunteering to help get one struggling festival through the next couple of months.

That was almost twenty years ago.

Clearly, I misunderstood the assignment.

How One Volunteer Accidentally Ended Up Running the Place

We stripped the 2007 event back to what we actually needed.

We examined expenses.

We found donations.

We begged, borrowed and improvised.

We treated wants as wants and needs as needs.

My professional background was project management, so that was essentially how I approached it: we had a deadline, limited resources and almost no money.

Figure out what absolutely had to happen.

Then make it happen.

The festival itself was chaotic, but we finished with a small profit.

More importantly, it gave us enough credibility to sit down honestly with the park authority, address the debt and talk about a future rather than simply abandoning the past.

I thought I had done my part.

Then, a few weeks later, I was working in Ahmedabad, India, on an assignment reviewing technology capabilities for a microfinance bank when I discovered that people back in Tulsa had apparently decided I should take over Scotfest.

I had only been part of the Scottish community for a matter of months.

Most of them barely knew me.

I wasn't really part of the conversation.

And yet somehow I had been selected to become Executive Director.

Surprise.

I reluctantly agreed, with conditions — including separating the festival nonprofit from the Scottish Club so it could operate independently and, perhaps rather arrogantly, making it clear that I had a vision for where the event needed to go.

I returned from India, looked properly at what I had inherited and had one of those moments familiar to anyone who has ever volunteered for something and accidentally become responsible for it:

Volunteering Has a Funny Way of Escalating

That is one of the lessons Scotfest has taught me.

Sometimes volunteering means working a gate for three hours.

Sometimes it means pouring beer.

Sometimes it means helping set up tents.

And sometimes you volunteer to be Treasurer for two months and somehow spend the next twenty years running a Scottish festival.

There should probably be a warning label.

But underneath the joke is something important.

Everything Scotfest has accomplished over forty-six years has depended on people deciding that something needed to be done and saying:

Not because somebody was paying them.

Not because it was convenient.

Not because they had nothing better to do.

They simply decided that it mattered.

Time Might Be the Most Valuable Donation We Receive

Organizations like ours understandably spend a lot of time talking about money.

Buy tickets early.

Become a sponsor.

Make a donation.

Support the vendors.

And all of those things are essential.

But there is another kind of donation that is every bit as important.

Time.

If someone volunteers ten hours at Scotfest, they've given us ten hours of their life.

They cannot earn those hours back.

If somebody takes vacation from work to help us build a festival, that's a donation.

If somebody works until midnight and comes back early the next morning, that's a donation.

If someone spends months coordinating an area, recruiting people, chasing information or solving problems, that's a donation.

Across forty-six years, the amount of volunteer time given to Scotfest must be extraordinary.

Tens of thousands of hours.

Probably far more.

And that labor is one of the reasons events like ours can exist at all.

If every job required to produce a festival had to be performed by a paid employee or contractor, the economics would change completely.

Ticket prices would rise.

Programming would shrink.

Some events simply wouldn't exist.

Volunteers aren't merely people who "help out."

And Sometimes They Become Family

At the end of that chaotic first festival in 2007, I finally left the site at around three in the morning.

I was exhausted.

On the drive home, I clipped a curb hard enough to blow out two tires.

Excellent ending to the evening.

I called Eric.

At that point, I'd only known him for a few months.

He came to help.

That may not sound like much compared with everything that has happened since, but I've thought about that story a lot over the years.

Because that's also volunteering.

You begin by working alongside someone because you've both agreed to help with an event.

Then eventually that person becomes the one you call at three o'clock in the morning when you're stranded beside the road with two flat tires.

Eric and I have since spent the better part of twenty years working alongside each other, occasionally arguing with each other, solving problems together and becoming the closest of friends.

There are many relationships in my life today that exist because of Scotfest.

People I never would have met.

People whose lives would never otherwise have crossed mine.

That is something you don't see on a financial statement.

Volunteering Isn't Always Wonderful

We should also stop pretending volunteering is permanently noble and uplifting.

It isn't.

Sometimes it is exhausting.

Sometimes it is frustrating.

Sometimes volunteers promise things and disappear.

Sometimes somebody is tremendously enthusiastic until actual work becomes involved.

Sometimes people create more work than they complete.

Sometimes personalities clash.

Sometimes everyone is tired and somebody says exactly the wrong thing at exactly the wrong moment.

Sometimes you seriously question why you keep doing it.

Volunteer organizations are messy because people are messy.

They have jobs.

Families.

Problems.

Illnesses.

Commitments.

Different personalities.

Different motivations.

And unlike employees, you cannot simply command someone to sacrifice more of something they're already giving you for free.

That makes leadership in a volunteer organization fundamentally different.

Ultimately, people have to believe the work matters.

For Scotfest, I always believed it did.

Was It Worth It?

There have been moments over the past twenty years when, had you asked me that question during festival weekend, my response might not have been suitable for publication on the official Scotfest website.

There have been moments of exhaustion.

Frustration.

Anger.

Disappointment.

And sacrifice.

There have also been extraordinary moments of friendship, pride, accomplishment and joy.

Sometimes those experiences occurred approximately eleven minutes apart.

That's what happens when you care about something.

So was it worth it?

Yes.

Not because every moment was wonderful.

It wasn't.

Not because everyone involved was wonderful.

They weren't.

And certainly not because volunteering is easy.

It isn't.

It was worth it because together we created something that mattered to people.

We gave families memories.

We introduced people to Scottish culture.

We gave musicians stages, athletes fields, clans a gathering place, vendors customers and thousands of people somewhere to come together.

And along the way, we created memories of our own.

That's the pain and the pleasure of volunteering.

You give up weekends.

You lose sleep.

You get frustrated.

You swear you're never doing it again.

And then you look around at something that didn't exist until a group of people decided to build it together.

And you think:

Twenty years ago, I volunteered to help a struggling Scottish festival survive one more year.

I had absolutely no idea what that decision would eventually cost me.

I also had no idea what it would give me.

There are stories behind both sides of that equation.

Over the next few weeks, as we approach Scotfest for the final time, I hope to tell some of them.

But this first story belongs to the volunteers.

To every person who has ever given Scotfest an hour, a weekend, a year or decades of their life: