I should've known better. There was me thinking I'd get some useful experience, keep my skills up to date and learn new things... It wasn't even as if I was working in a 'traditional' project - no middle class middle aged ladies who lunch here. Instead I was doing something I thought I'd fit in well with. How wrong...
It seems that no matter what you've done in the past, if you're a volunteer then you're automatically presumed to be skilless and stupid. And right-on, community-based organisations are no different. Despite fancy recruitment literature and impressive policies, all you're asked to do is the filing, answering the phone, taking messages, etc. It wouldn't even be too bad if volunteers got to do other things as well, but the attitude remains in the 'if-they're-a -volunteer-then-they-must-be-thick' mode. At one of the places I worked, it was even suggested that volunteers should have the 'responsibility' of going out and buying the milk every morning - as this was generally believed that this would give them experience! (and the volunteers in this organisation consisted of a former community worker for an AIDS project, a social work student and a woman who'd worked with the United Nations in Yugoslavia)
The thing that confuses me most about this attitude is that for many jobs the only way to get enough relevant experience is to get it through working for free. If you want a career in advice work or a place on a social work course, then you have at some point to be a volunteer. But it's not just people who are looking for more experience who do voluntary work - with 'downsizing' making people change careers more often and early retirement, there's a lot of people out there who want to use their skills productively - and being a volunteer seems to offer the perfect opportunity to do this.
When asked, most organisations emphasise how keen they are to take on volunteers and claim that they certainly don't just use them for the mindnumbingly boring crap jobs. Unfortunately there's a big gap between rhetoric and reality. Despite having an impressive application form to fill out which sets out the reasons why you want to volunteer and the opportunity to list your relevant experience, the same volunteers are then asked 'would you like to be trained to do clerical work?' or told that there's an opportunity to go on an outward bound course designed for people with no formal education.
On the occasions when volunteers are finally allowed to contribute to some 'proper' work, it's often the case that the resources to do it are totally inadequate. When I was helping people with social security claims, I was given no information about their claim histories - I was even told there were no records! This resulted in claims that would have usually taken an hour to sort out dragging on for the whole day.
I used to be sceptical when I was faced with the attitude that volunteering was just for the privileged upper classes with time on their hands and nothing better to do. But judging from my own experiences, I'd presume it's just for people who don't want to gain anything positive from it - like the old stereotypes the organisations claim they want to get away from.