The temptation to accept a volunteer, anyone who will work for free and can walk through the door, is a strong one. Bad experiences, however, have brought the realization that volunteer screening is a necessary part of volunteer recruitment.

It’s important to think about what level of screening you need for your volunteer program. Some programs might only need an introduction to the organization and the work it does. Order up some pizzas, make some brownies, and bring in that group of volunteers to let them know about your organization and thank them for donating their time.

Other organizations might need a more robust screening procedure. Will your volunteers work with children or the elderly? It might be a good idea to have a one-on-one meeting with your volunteers and run a background check.

• The purpose of screening is to get the right person to the right job, not just to rule out inappropriate candidates.
• Fairness and consistency are important. Treat every volunteer applying for the same position in the same way, and never lower your standards, no matter how desperate for volunteers you are.
• The level of screening you do should be tied to the demands and risks of the volunteer position. Screen wisely, because you are ultimately responsible for the actions of your volunteers.
• When interviewing volunteers, ask open-ended questions to unearth the person’s motivations and to understand what they want to get out of the volunteer experience.
• References can tell you more by what they don’t say than what they do say. Short and clipped answers can serve as a red flag.
• Saying “no” to an under-qualified or otherwise inappropriate candidate is not easy, but it’s better than having to fire that person later on.
• If you do have to say “no,” don’t just close the door on the volunteer. Take a few minutes to look around at organizations that have similar missions to yours, and suggest those as possible opportunities for volunteering. If you know other volunteer managers who are looking for volunteers, pass the volunteer’s name along if the volunteer wasn’t the right fit for you but they might fit better somewhere else.

Related articles

• Seven Questions to Ask Before Recruiting New Volunteers
• Five Tips for Recruiting and Retaining Skilled Volunteers
• Six Tips for Writing Volunteer Position Descriptions

Today’s post comes from Nele Noppe, a Japanese Studies PhD student living in Kyoto, who helped with tsunami recovory in the Tohuku region of Japan. You can read the original post here.

I just went offline for a good week to go to Tohoku, the north-eastern part of Japan, and help clean up debris that was left by the earthquake and tsunami in March.

The Japanese NGO Peace Boat organizes longer stays and also short-term trips of only a few days for anyone who wants to go help, whether they speak Japanese or not, and I probably wouldn’t have managed to go without their assistance.

Here’s a brief description of what we did up there, some pictures, and some bonus ranting about nuclear panic. I’ll write up a longer post elsewhere.

Peace Boat took us from Tokyo to Ishinomaki, a Miyagi prefecture city of about a hundred and sixty thousand people that was half flooded and lost over five thousand of its residents.

Because tsunami warning systems were in place, many people managed to flee to higher ground in time, in Ishinomaki and elsewhere. But it was still the tsunami that dealt the real blow on March 11, far more than the earthquake.

Although the quake caused widespread material damage, autopsies of victims later revealed that the vast majority of the people who died in Tohoku drowned. The tsunami was responsible not just for most of the loss of life, but also for the particular kind of damage to houses that makes the whole mess so hard for individual residents to clean up, and the involvement of volunteers so necessary.

Destroyed neighborhood of Kadonowaki, where the Ishinomaki City Hospital is almost the only structure still mostly intact. Photo by Bruno Nakandakari, taken from the hill where many residents managed to take shelter.

Here’s of Ishinomaki and its surroundings. If you zoom in, you can see quite clearly where the worst of the tsunami damage is.

There’s nothing left of the residential neighborhood Kadonowaki right at the coast (yellow placemark). We drove through it on the bus once, and it’s just one immense field of debris.

It looks much, much larger up close than on the map. (Other places indicated: the city center, the Mangattan manga museum, the historic whaling port of Ayukawa (completely destroyed), the town of Onagawa (see later in this post), the Onagawa nuclear plant, Ogawa Elementary School (which lost seventy percent of its pupils and nearly all teachers), and a few locations where our group did cleanup work.)

Along most of the coastline to the west and east of Kadonowaki, there are many large factories between the water and the houses. These also sustained very heavy damage, but fortunately, they also broke some of the incoming water’s force. It still got into the city beyond, but the factories shielded the homes and businesses behind them enough that most weren’t simply flattened in an instant but “only” had their ground floors flooded.

Where there were no large factories between the sea and the residential neighborhoods, like in Kadonowaki, the waters were so high and fast that they razed every house to the ground for over half a mile inland and only stopped because they hit a large hill. The tsunami also rushed up several rivers and struck parts of the city that were further from the coast.

Still, there’s a huge area where thousands of houses sustained heavy damage but can still be salvaged. They need to be cleaned out, though, before the necessary reparations to walls and floors can be done, and that’s where the problem is.

The government cleared the streets, but homeowners have to take care of their properties themselves. The mess inside those houses is absolutely breathtaking. Everything is covered in at least four or five inches of thick, stinking, pitch black muck.

The water lifted furniture and tatami mats off the floors, crashed right through closets and flushed out their contents, and jumbled everything together so that rooms are filled with a wall-to-wall pile of debris and mud that is sometimes waist-high. The mud has to be scooped out and loaded into sand bags or huge one-ton bags outside.

Broken belongings need to be sorted in separate trash bags, and there are often valuables and family mementos in there that need to be separated out as well. There’s large shards of glass from broken windows mixed in as well. Everything stinks, and the smell will only get worse now that summer’s here.

A room before cleanup.

Nele Noppe is a Manga translator and Japanese Studies PhD student doing research on the cultural economy of fanwork, currently living in Kyoto.