Honey B Adger wrote: ↑Sun Jun 02, 2019 12:12 am
You advised a newbie a while back not to sign up to volunteer too much for the first time out there.
This will be my first BM, and I wanted to get involved immediately, so I signed up right away to get placed on a team that I would like. I planned to sign up for a fair amount of volunteer time.
Has your opinion changed on this topic? If not, what do you suggest is the best way to get involved?
Nope, I'm afraid that it hasn't, and that I'm even firmer in my opinion that burgins really should not be signing up to volunteer before they've actually experienced BRC.
IMHO, Gaminwench is absolutely right ... let your first year be the community's gift to you.
Get out and explore the city, especially the nooks and crannies and events that the 20-something EDM-party crowd never sees.
Make the effort to really talk to people when you find strange camps to visit, and let your surprise/enthusiasm/gratitude be your gifts to them.
Give yourself space to experience as much of that as you can ... there's absolutely no way that you'll be able to explore more than a fraction of the city during the week.
And then, if you aren't suffering from an overload, and you find yourself falling in love with the place, and are inspired with the desire/need to give something back ... THEN you'll have no trouble at all finding opportunities posted daily at the three V-Spots, both from the departments that make the city function, and from camps or art projects that find that they need some last-minute help.
Heck, if you're actually talking to people, then you may even find that one of the camps that you discover and love turns out to need a bit of extra help ... and you might find yourself on the track to getting invited to camp with them next year.
That would be my advice ... and
part of the reason for it is that everyone loses track of time (to a certain extent) on the playa, and so both volunteer departments, and camps too, suffer from newbies that are just so overwhelmed that they miss the shifts that they have signed up for; which then puts a huge extra burden on those folks that actually do turn up and need to get the shift's work done.
Some depts just refuse to allow burgins to volunteer at all anymore, and some will limit the number of new-volunteers on a shift (how ever many years they've been to BRC) ... either because the job really
needs to be done, or because its just not fair on everyone else.
Honey B Adger wrote: ↑Sun Jun 02, 2019 12:12 am
And what if I don't get placed with a camp?
???
Maybe it's just a slip of the digital pen, or your use of langauge ... but to my ear, you've made it sound as though there's some overall authority that places people with a camp, and that's just not the case.
You can find a place
in a camp, but that's up to you and, far more importantly, the camp itself and its recruitment policy.
As it is ... it is already late-in-the-day to get a spot in most camps, especially since you don't already have a ticket.
There's nothing wrong with not being in an organized camp, and some people distinctly prefer it, including some folk who spend a lot of time volunteering in the various ORG departments.
Anyway ... networking with burners in your local community, attending events and volunteering off-playa with camps/projects is one of the best ways to get seen and known, and to have opportunities come up. Even if that doesn't help you this year, it'll put you on a path for next year.
Best Wishes, and Good Luck!
