TEACHING TRADITIONAL MARITIME SKILLS

GETTING USEFUL WORK FROM VOLUNTEERS

Christopher Jannini, Ship Preservation Specialist

San Francisco Maritime National Historical Park

Introduction

At San Francisco Maritime National Historical Park (SFMNHP) we have been utilizing volunteers in most departments for many years with varying degrees of success. Over the past three years, a concerted effort by our cooperating association and Park management has resulted in a great increase in both the number of volunteers and in the quality of work that they have generated. Hyde Street Pier has a significant collection of large and small sailing craft and in an average summer month we utilize approximately seventy five volunteers who donate over 1700 hours of their valuable time. Their work covers a broad spectrum of disciplines including small boat repair, sail setting and other demonstrations, docent tours, living history actors, machinery repair and restoration, general cleaning, sailing, general carpentry and rigging work. The numbers above do not include the other volunteers who put in many more hundreds of hours at other locations in our park assisting in the library, collections, historic documents, exhibit shop and office.

To put these numbers in another perspective, the pier volunteers alone represent the equivalent work of about ten full time employees. This does not mean that ten people are out of work because of the decision to utilize volunteer labor, all of our designated staff positions are filled. Rather it means that we are able to do so much more because they have so generously given us their time. In most cases the work they do is not equivalent to the work done by journeyman level staff in terms of hourly output, but because of our extensive training most of our volunteers work at least as well as a highly skilled apprentice once they have been with us for a while.

Skilled and unskilled volunteer labor can effectively save an organization large amounts of revenue. We use large corporate volunteer efforts often. Last year Levi Strauss sent us a group of about 80 staff who painted ½ mile of pier railings in one day. This saved the Park about $12,000. A group of our regular volunteer riggers refurbished the rigging of our scow schooner ALMA during January 2001. This project came up unexpectedly and, due to prior commitments, the permanent staff could not attempt it. Our skilled volunteer force filled the void and did all of the work. They stripped off all old service, inspected the splices, wormed, parcelled and served all of wire, wire seized and leathered the collars, etc. Their effort saved us about $20,000 if we had been forced to contract the work out.

On the other hand, we have not always had the success that we are now experiencing today. We have seen volunteers use us as a revolving door, coming in to work for awhile then disappearing without a trace and without giving us a reason why. We have had our share of staff indifference and lack of initiative in using volunteer labor and we have had our share of volunteers who just didn’t work out for any number of reasons.

The dramatic turnaround we have experienced in both our numbers and quality of work can be attributed to a number of factors which are the basis for any good volunteer program. These fundamentals have not been invented by us but have been gleaned from other professionals and authors such as Steve McCurley and Rich Lynch, Susan Ellis, and Betty B. Stallings. The details of establishing and operating a superior volunteer program are contained in their texts and others and I will only highlight some of the most important strategies here and cite some specific examples of how our program works within the context of maritime preservation and restoration. (see bibliography)

Create a Distinct Volunteer Division

Once the decision has been made by an administration to establish a volunteer corps, it is absolutely critical to set it up as a fully functioning and important division in the organization. It is not enough to simply say ‘let there be volunteers’ and expect a cadre of experienced and dedicated citizens to flood in and lend a hand. Simply assigning a staff person as the volunteer supervisor and expecting him or her to ‘go out and get us some volunteer help’ is not going to work well either. I know this for a fact as that is how I first became the Volunteer Supervisor at our park.

It is absolutely essential to involve the regular staff, whether they will be supervising volunteers or not, in the process of designing the parameters of the program in order establish its purpose and usefulness. Staff will want to know why there is a need for volunteers and they can be asked to think of some of the many things that could be accomplished if there were more hands to help them.

Staff Acceptance

Staff who do not believe in volunteers and who do not want to work with them can destroy the effort either through obstructionism or even simple indifference. The authors I have sited above have some simple techniques for getting the paid staff to buy in to the idea of utilizing volunteer help. If your volunteer division is meeting staff resistance and you think that it should be an important part of your maritime preservation and community outreach efforts, I urge you to go back to basics and try to reinvigorate staff interest by inviting them to join in the redesign effort.

Some staff will never accept volunteers no matter what the administration wants. Some staff just feel uncomfortable supervising others. One of the biggest mistakes an administrator can make, and one which will doom a volunteer program faster than almost any other factor, is to assign an unwilling staff person and try to force them to work with volunteers. If their job description did not include the potential of working with volunteers when they were first hired, they may have a case for refusing. The volunteers assigned to such a person will soon be out the door anyway. No one is going to volunteer to do what is often difficult and dirty work if their supervisor is making the workplace even mildly inhospitable. If, after an appropriate training period, a paid staff volunteer supervisor just isn’t willing or able to do the job, I would suggest dropping the program or at least that part of it that is affected, until a suitable alternative can be found. Disgruntled employees working with unhappy volunteers are not going to be very productive in any event.

The Coordinator

Let’s assume that you have a dedicated paid staff who are willing and able to work with volunteers. The questions now become: what are the volunteers going to do?, where do they come from?, who is going to get them? At San Francisco Maritime National Historical Park we are lucky enough to have a full time Volunteer Coordinator, paid for by our cooperating association. Her main focus is on attracting and maintaining a volunteer staff. The fact that she has an extensive sailing background and has for years worked on vessel restoration is an important factor for us in the matching of volunteer interest to the areas where we need help. I cannot stress enough the importance of a coordinator whose primary work is running the volunteer program. This position is critical and should be more than just collateral assigned duties. The coordinator sets the tone for the newly recruited volunteers. Often they are the first person in the organization a volunteer meets. Our Coordinator conducts the initial interview of prospective volunteers and can accept them and invite them to meet with an appropriate supervisor or she can tell them that they just don’t seem to be a good fit for the type of work we have or what we offer won’t fit their personal needs and expectations.

Volunteer Staff

The use of the term “volunteer staff” is no accident. Their maintenance is no less complicated than the maintenance of the paid staff through the Human Resources office. Make no mistake, volunteers must be treated much the same as paid staff in that they are covered by workers’ insurance for on the job injuries, they receive safety training, they get to wear a cool uniform and they can be let go for the same reasons that a paid staff member can be dismissed. Remember, volunteer simply means unpaid. We do tend to be a little lenient when it comes to the issue of tardiness and absenteeism though. It’s hard to fire someone for being late to their volunteer job or changing their mind and going sailing on their day off instead of yet another day of (ughh) scraping and painting on old ships.

Just like any other staff member, a volunteer must have a distinct job description. These are written in consultation with the administration managers and staff volunteer supervisors in order to be able to ascertain what work needs to be done and inform the volunteers as to what is to be expected of them. For the most part, they are simplified versions of the job descriptions written for the staff. This makes sense as the volunteers are often doing the same work and are essentially staff assistants. Because paid staff has had input into the volunteer job descriptions, it gives them a better understanding of how the program works to help them.

So we have a well defined program and some dedicated staff to help run it, we have well defined job descriptions and we have a lot of volunteers ready and willing to work. What happens next?

Professional vs. Volunteer Skillsets

Notice that I did not say that we have a lot of skilled volunteers ready and willing to work. Because of the often arcane work we do in the maritime restoration field, we don’t often get people with a lot of the skills that we need. We will take them if they show up but most of the people who do this work for a living: shipwrights; riggers; machinists; etc., do not volunteer to do the same work on their day off for no pay. I am a case in point. Long before I became an employee of the park as a Rigger, I was a volunteer here in the J. Porter Shaw Library. The maintenance division could have used my skills as a Rigger and ships’ carpenter. I helped in the rig when it was really needed but I was much more interested in putting my volunteer effort into helping out in the library. Filing maritime related newspaper and magazine articles is boring, but it was a job that needed to be done in the place that I wanted to be in.

In fact I feel that if you only match the professional skillsets of a person to a vacant volunteer position, that person is more likely to ‘burn out’ and leave the organization as their time spent will eventually feel just like work. For example, our Small Boat Shop participated in the Brest/ Douarnenez 2000 international traditional wooden boat festival. Two of our volunteers in the Small Boat Shop are professional designers. They designed organized and fabricated the display panels which accompanied our boats to France. The fact that they were intimately involved in the boat restorations, made for an exceptional display.

This lack of volunteers arriving on our doorstep with tools in hand and years of experience on their resume, means that we have to have an extensive training program set up in order to utilize the many hours of labor that are available to us. We also have to establish a more laid back approach to some of our work schedules and expect that any project that relies to a great extent on volunteer efforts is going to take a long time to reach an end result.

Occasionally we are lucky enough to be visited by professionals in various fields. If the opportunity arises, we are quick to ask them if they will share of their expertise and show some volunteer a few tricks of the trade. Learning a new method of doing a job that the volunteer may already know gives us a more well rounded worker.

Traditional Skills Training

A properly trained volunteer can do almost any job that our regular staff can do, if they can’t, they can certainly be of great assistance when a staff member needs the help of someone with at least a rudimentary knowledge of the job at hand.

The various paid staff have different techniques for how they conduct the job training. In some cases such as with Docents and our Living History actors, there is a very formal training en masse two or three times a year which includes much written material and study at home. The Small Boat Shop, Riggers and Shipwrights however, are much more informal and train each volunteer as they arrive.

Primary supervisors should also be good teachers as well. In the Small Boat shop for instance, a new volunteer with absolutely no shop tool experience, will be given a basic shop safety orientation and then can expect to receive individual training on each of the tools as the progress of the job warrants. He or she may learn how to properly grind and sharpen a chisel one week in order to help cut a keel rabbet and a few weeks later be given instruction on the operation of a planer and table saw when it’s time to mill wood for planking. In this case, another more experienced volunteer may be the instructor if the supervising staff is otherwise occupied.

Relying on more experienced volunteers is often the best way to pass on some of the traditional crafts to a newer generation, especially as some of our volunteers are very eager to show off the talents they have acquired . Teaching a skill reinforces the skill in the teacher and the student can see that even though the work we do is often antiquated, it’s not that hard to learn.

Recently I observed a scene in which parents, who had come to pick up their 17 year old son, stood and watched with awe as he taught two other volunteers, one older and one younger, how to splice wire. I’m not sure that Mom and Dad really had much idea what their son was doing down at the pier all those summer days but they seemed as proud as if he had just pitched a perfect game in the high school world series. I know I was.

Trust and Leadership

Staff supervisors have to trust in their own ability to teach the required skills and in the ability of the volunteers to learn them and be able to do good work. For the most part volunteers are present because they are truly interested and caring and they want to do the best job possible. The work necessarily takes longer for volunteers as they don’t use the skills on a daily basis as the staff does. However if the program is sound, enough volunteers will come regularly thereby increasing their ability.

There seems to be an affinity for ‘old hands’ to help with the training of the ‘newbies’. They also often find some aspect of what we do particularly interesting and take this on as a pet project. We have volunteers who really like to varnish and treat every piece as if it was a grand piano. Some volunteers have ‘adopted’ a particular small boat and take care of them as if they were an only child.

By utilizing the more experienced hands as task leaders, many more projects can be run simultaneously. It also allows me to come to a conference like this one knowing full well that my ‘group leaders’ are going to see to it that work gets checked off the list while I am away.

Patience and Time

This type of training can be extremely time consuming and can sometimes cost a bit in miss cut materials but it has benefits in terms of the preservation work accomplished and the satisfaction of the passing on of traditional skills. For example, the Small Boat Shop volunteers and staff have been rebuilding MERRY BEAR, a 25’ long sloop, for almost three years now. They have done all manner of work from removing screws, recanvassing the deckhouse, and cutting wood plugs, to steambending all new frames and everything in between. This work gets done whenever there is time available in the hectic schedule of maintaining the other eight boats in our floating fleet as well as building new boats with high school students. Without the availability of a volunteer crew, this restoration probably would never have been attempted. With the volunteers alongside to urge and cajole and help with problem solving, the restoration will be completed and the volunteers, staff and the public will once again be able to see Bearboat #1 ply the waters of San Francisco Bay.

Mixing the Fun With the Mundane

The preservation of the 300’ ship BALCLUTHA is a job that will never be completed. Like that famous bridge it gets painted and varnished from bow to stern then go back to the bow.. Great for job security but lousy for trying to keep volunteers interested. Add to that the fact somehow all the teenagers tend to migrate toward her and you can maybe see that it takes a different approach in order to keep them interested beyond the 40 hours of Community Service they need to graduate high school. So we trade. They scrape and sand the fife rails and I take them aloft. They sort out forty drawers of mixed up screws and I teach them how to tie a one handed bowline. They paint out a cabin and varnish the ladder and I teach them how to splice wire. Now they have something cool they can tell their friends about. And they get their friends to come too. And they show them how to do some neat stuff.

Sharing the Experience

The way I look at it, it is the year 1886 and the volunteers (adults too) are all 14 year old apprentices who have signed on BALCLUTHA for a voyage. There are things that they are going to have to know in order to survive at sea such as: how to work aloft; how to use a bo’s’ns chair; how to tie various knots and use them in their proper applications; how to sew canvas sails; how to move a load using a capstan, how to throw a heaving line and how to navigate. I try to teach something new each day and I often do it in full view of the public (our splicing vise is set up outside on the pier) as the visitors are often fascinated that people still do some of these arcane things.

Not only are the volunteers learning skills that are applied to the maintenance of the vessel but they are adding to the visitor experience. Volunteers made the cargo net that we use to raise and lower equipment into the ship, a university volunteer researched, built and demonstrated a chip log for measuring a ships’ speed, a 16 year old volunteer took the project of making canvas ditty bags to the extreme and hand seamed a pair of coveralls for herself and a sail for one of the small boats (they both perfect). Fourteen and 15 year old volunteers spliced the wire ratlines that we use to access the main top just as they would have had they been apprentices on BALCLUTHA in 1886. One of the teenagers made the bellropes for the ships and now makes small ones for sale in a local shop. Another teenager didn’t come back last summer because she was charging $15.00 per hour to varnish yachts, a skill she learned here. One volunteer graduates this year from the California Maritime Academy and another, at age 28, is just starting there.

I could go on and on. It is about trust in the ability of people to learn new skills and that they can and will apply them and teach them to others. It is about realizing that this kind of work was commonplace in 1886 and was done by teenagers then and can be done by teenagers and adults now.

Conclusion

Supervisors must pass on their knowledge and trust the volunteers to do the work as directed. They have to trust in the desire and ability of more experienced volunteers to pass on the knowledge that they have gained. This can only occur if volunteers are getting so much satisfaction from the work that they are doing and pride in the skills that they have learned that they remain for an extended period of time. If the work is nothing but drudgery, you will spend all your time recruiting and get little or no useful work done.

Many people say that the social aspect is as important to the volunteer effort as the actual work they do. We have Saturday snacks, eat lunch together, work on large group projects, share skills, sing sea chanteys and have a monthly free dinner . We make use of every perk available to us from discounts at the bookstore to multiple opportunities to go sailing. They keep coming back.

Make it fun. Make it instructive. Keep the pressure to meet deadlines to a minimum if you can but always expect high standards. Encourage the volunteers to use and show off their new skills if they want to. Don’t let the volunteers do only the work that the staff would rather not do. Work alongside them and treat them as the coworkers that they are. You may be surprised at the quality of the effort and the quality of the work that can come from volunteers.

BIBLIIOGRAPHY

Steve McCurley Essential Volunteer Management

Rick Lynch (Downer’s Grove, Il : VM Systems) 1989

Susan J. Ellis The Volunteer Recruitment Book

(Philadelphia: Energize Inc.) 1996

Betty B. Stallings Training Busy Staff to Succeed With Volunteers

(Pleasanton, CA: Building Better Skills) 1996

Acknowledgments

Many thanks to:

Rich Pekelney for suggesting the topic.

Sue Schmidt our VIP coordinator who organizes, feeds, and clothes us all

and who helped with her ideas and intimate knowledge of the program.

Jason Rucker, John Muir, Erik Olson, Channing Walker, Al Lutz, Charter Kayes, John Conway, Steve Hyman and all the other staff at SF Maritime who help with the Volunteer Program.

Kathy Lohan and the Maritime Park Association for their financial support.

Bill Thomas, Superintendent and Wayne Boykin, Ship’s Manager for allowing me the time to present this paper.

And most importantly to Amy Hosa without whom the slide show would never have happened.