How Can I Help?
What to do when a charity mismanages its volunteers.
Do you have a real-life do-gooding dilemma? Please send it to ask.my.goodness@gmail.com.
From the volunteers' point of view, their hours appear to be a lovely gift—and indeed they are. Volunteer help, though, is not really free labor for the organizations; they need to invest in management so they don't waste that time. It's certainly not too much to ask that they set up a system by which they manage to call you when they say they're going to. It's also not too much to ask that you do some investigating to find a place with its act together and then to get yourself in the door.
—Constance
Do you have a real-life do-gooding dilemma? Please send it to ask.my.goodness@gmail.com.
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Constance Casey is a former New York City Department of Parks gardener and writes the monthly "Species" column for Landscape Architecture Magazine.
Photograph of woman shrugging by Jupiterimages/Getty Images.