Ranell Hansen, Volunteer Coordinator

Friendship Center, Santa Barbara, CA

Exercise time at Friendship Center

I get volunteers from lots of places. I get community service volunteers that are referred from the probation office. I get volunteers from lots of different places. Right now I'm recruiting from corporate. I'm sending letters out to people to see if their employees are interested in volunteering.

I get volunteers from churches. Some of our volunteers I get from ads in the newspaper. I do a lot of personal outreach. We also go to the community service fairs of all the high schools and I get high school students that come in and volunteer, and then we try to fit them into the position that's best suited for them.

We have about 700 volunteers annually. By the month, professional volunteers we have about 15-20, regular volunteers we have some times as many as 80. We count all of our school groups as volunteers, we count other organizations that come and volunteer.

High school kids - a lot of them don't have grandparents, or their grandparents live far away. So they interact with different people and different generations and find out what they are all about. Also they get an idea of what it's like to help and to serve. A lot of the people are frail, so they get an experience of being a helper.

Jamie, a Friendship Center volunteer

I had a boy volunteer doing community service in exchange for a tattoo removal. He was in a group home where they encourage volunteering. When he came to us he was reluctant to even talk to adults and look them in the face. He was here for probably three months, volunteering every other day 3-4 hours, and he turned his life around. He became an upstanding citizen. He was in trouble for drugs; he quit his drugs, got a job, he's now on his own and has his own apartment, and he comes back and visits with us. He says: "You really taught me how to work." That was really wonderful.

Volunteers give service and get something in return. Volunteers here really get something of their own. It's a feeling of being touched by being of service to someone. They go home just extatic some times, because they have helped someone, or they have touched someone's life or someone's life has touched theirs. It's an internal kind of a reward.