Credit plan for volunteers

The City of Greater Geraldton and local business owners are discussing the possible implementation of a volunteer credit system to recognise those who perform unpaid work.

JaffleShack owner Christian Watters pitched the idea at Pollinators ‘GeroSoup’ meet up in May, suggesting a universal system for all volunteer organisations in Geraldton with approved volunteer organisations being able to hand out credit at a standard rate - preventing potential competition between groups.

The credits could be used to track which individuals were contributing large amounts of volunteer work, how the community was volunteering as a whole, and could potentially be cashed out or traded for goods and services down the line.

Mr Watters said the system was comparable to point reward systems like airmiles, but would be exclusively available for volunteers.

“The situation was that I’d become aware of some later in life people who were no longer working because of the downturn - but doing a huge amount of volunteer work,” he said.

“But they were not recognised, both within themselves and with others, for the amount of work they were doing.

“If you went to work every day and someone didn’t pay you, you’d have to ask yourself; what am I even worth?”

Mr Watters said the system could also help secure funding for government projects by showing who was volunteering in the city and how much work they were doing.

“Governments want to see effort in kind, and a system like this would show just how many hours of volunteer work are done in this city every day,” he said.

“If the theory is data is king, you’ve suddenly got data.

You’ve got to enter your interests and your age, those kind of details, so now you’ve got a profile of who your volunteers actually are and you’ve suddenly changed volunteering, almost overnight.”

APEX Geraldton president Paul Dyer said his organisation, which encourages young people to provide volunteer services, was desperately looking for more members, and anything which encouraged more people to volunteer was a benefit.

“You think about organisations like Foodbank, Charity Begins at Home, Geraldton Dog Rescue, Pregnancy Problem House, those are a couple of paid staff and a huge amount of volunteer effort,” he said.

“If you could put something together to actually track all this it would be a great way for the City and MWDC to quantify the contribution that volunteers actually make.”

City chief executive Ken Diehm said he was surprised to hear of Mr Watter’s idea at the meet-up, because the City had been discussing a very similar volunteer reward system internally.

“An outcome from the workshop at was for a number of parties to collaborate and work together on the development of the program and potentially create a trial,” he said.

“Volunteers are essential to the delivery of services within our community and we think a program trail would be a great start.”