How to run Sanctuary

We are starting this page in 2019. The intent is to fill it with a bunch of information that will make running Sanctuary in 2020 much easier.

Delegatable Tasks

Running Firefly Sanctuary to its full potential is a ton of work. Delegation is key. This section will list tasks that are great candidates for delegation. It's possible to imagine us having a different person assigned to each of these tasks, possibly avoiding the usual situation where a few people end up doing a stressful amount of work! In an ideal world we'll have one person on each of these roles, one person who is "backup" should the first person get busy, and have weekly meetings starting in April where all these folks get together to work on things and share updates.

To Do list and deadline tracker

This should be the person everyone (internal to Sanctuary and outside of Sanctuary) can go to to ask "What's the latest on task ___?" or "What's the latest on our question about ____?". The person in this role should be prepared to answer with "As of X days ago person Y was the one in charge of that, Y@ff.org is their email, the most recent update they gave me was Z, and I have a check-in scheduled with them about that task in W days."

Booking training spaces

Have an accessibility contact

Think about bathroom door length, someone lifting themselves onto the toilet, getting a wheelchair there, and being able to reach the sink if they are in a chair.

Can you make the bathrooms gender neutral?

Tracking who is signed up for which training

We're very happy we used a waitlist

The BARCC training we had 10 people signed up for (besides co-leads) and 5 came

The June 5th training we had 28 people signed up and a 6 person waitlist, __ came

^^ It's possible sending out more reminders would have helped this, we only sent out reminders a couple of days before

Volunteer liason

Keep track of individual volunteers:

• What training is this person signed up for?
• Did they attend?
• Have their credentials been reviewed for potential SME status?
• Are they interested in doing an LS shift?
• Are they signed up for shifts?
• Do they have signup permissions?
• Do they have a ticket?
• Do they have any flexibility to move their shift to an understaffed time, or to take on more shifts?
• Are they in the Boston area and should be invited to the picnic or other social events?

It would be awesome to be able to keep track of individuals this way, but it could be a lot of work. This year we have 73 volunteers; I think it would be nice to have a Volunteer Liason for every 20 people

Communications

Keep track of all the tidbits of information that need to go out, and draft them into nice emails. Make a Google Sheet to collect the emails of everyone who should get that email, and poke Volunteer Liasons to get that sheet up to date before you send out the communication.

Tracking shift coverage

Do some math like

There are 13 Logistics Supervisor shifts we need to fill...

We have 82 days until the even...

Let's hustle harder if 82/13=6 days have passed and we haven't filled another shift

Looking through the stored Sanctuary assets

Requires a car

Getting the Sanctuary shelter up there and getting it set up

Decide way ahead of time which work weekend this will happen on

Requires a car

Updating all the materials in the binder

• Volunteer manual
• Sexual assault guidance sheet
• Child response guidance sheet
• Suicidality guidance sheet
• Extra readings
• What to do when someone visits and is looking for someone
• The background of each SME, LS, and the EMTs
• What the EMTs can do

Ambassador: Compare notes with Sanctuaries at other Burns

enjoyingthedance@gmail.com was sanctuary co-lead at COnstellation Burn

mysticgreene was Sanctuary Lead at Nectr

Collaborator

We'd love to work more closely with

• Accessibility
• Touchpoints

Other ideas to consider

1. Creating shifts where Sanctuary volunteers wander, with or without Rangers
2. Use the online volunteer system for TRAININGS signups, and use a Google Doc for the schedule.
3. Set up weekly "Sanctuary Committee" meetings right from the start (April)
4. See if on each shift you can have
   1. People more or less likely to drop out last minute or be pushed out by us because they didn't show up for a training. Namely:
      1. People signed up for an early training or who are already trained are likely to not drop out
      2. People who are deep on the waitlist are more likely to drop out
      3. People who are not getting trained until FF might miss that training and then be pushed out last minute
   2. Someone available with the following skillsets:
      1. Suicidality
      2. Sexual assault
      3. Substance addiction/abuse
      4. IPV
   3. Different genders
5. When people sign up ask for the minimum and maximum of what they'd like to do. For reference, give them a chart that shows "In 2019 48 people did 4 hours, 10 people did 6 hours..." etc.
6. Have accessibility info: "At Sanctuary you can sit, here's how you get up there, if you're on call we want you to be able to head straight to Sanctuary..."

Other mistakes to learn from

1. We accidentally ordered enough t-shirts for everyone who had signed up for trainings, when many of them didn't need t-shirts because they didn't actually get to the point of signing up for shifts
2. It would be nice if we could get our own webpage updated without having to email communications
3. The volunteer schedule defines the next day as 4 AM
4. If you're doing an online video conference training, make sure to check that the video conference solution doesn't have a cap that's below the number of participants you're expecting. Last year we tried to use Hangouts for a 20-40 person training, quickly hit the 10 person limit, and then had to scramble and were lucky to find out someone had a business account on Zoom.