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Info You Can Use: Volunteer Liability

May 10, 2011

by:

Joe Patti

An appreciative nod to the Gene Takagi at Non Profit Law blog for linking to a Charity Lawyer post about a non-profit’s liability in respect to volunteers.

Guest blogger Deanna Rader notes that a non-profit may be liable for the actions of their volunteers under a doctrine known as respondeat superior which holds that an employer can be responsible for the acts an employee commits in the course of executing their duties. Some states have extended this concept to include volunteers.

In this context, Rader suggests that care be taken in selecting and training volunteers.

* How will volunteers be utilized? The risk of liability increases as the volunteer is given more responsibility and independence. Carefully choose the responsibilities that will be given to volunteers. Also, there should be a clear delineation between the tasks performed by employees and those performed by volunteers.

* What selection criteria should be used? You should use care to ensure that the volunteers selected are fit to serve in the positions at your agency. Your selection criteria may differ based on the responsibilities given to different volunteers. If you are using volunteers to serve children, disabled individuals, or other vulnerable populations, your selection criteria may include a background investigation and criminal history check. If your volunteers sort food for a food bank serving adults, however, a background investigation may not be required.

* What training is necessary? Before putting volunteers to work, they need to be trained to perform the assigned tasks. Otherwise, you could be held liable for their negligent performance of those tasks if it causes injury to others. Also, the nonprofit organization could be held liable if a volunteer who is not properly trained injures himself or herself because of inadequate training.

* How will the volunteers be supervised? Volunteers should have appropriate supervision based on the tasks assigned. A warehouse volunteer who is performing physical labor may not need close supervision, whereas volunteers dealing with vulnerable populations may need to be closely monitored.

* How will problems be addressed? Although good volunteers provide invaluable assistance, bad volunteers can expose you to substantial liability. Do not be afraid to address problems head-on and terminate the volunteer relationship if a volunteer exhibits inappropriate behavior.

Rader also address injury that a volunteer might take in the course of the service to the non-profit. Employees are covered under worker’s compensation laws while volunteers are not. However, it is important to clearly delineate between the two categories of workers. In addition, employers have a responsibility to provide a safe work environment to everyone who may enter their premises, regardless of employment status.

“An employer also has a duty to maintain safe working premises for an employee. Many states have applied this doctrine expressly to nonprofit organizations, requiring them to maintain a safe place for volunteers to work or finding them to be negligent in failing to provide a safe place for a volunteer to deliver services. This duty can apply even if the volunteer is working off premises while providing services for the nonprofit organization, making the nonprofit corporation liable for the actions or inactions of a third party.”

Among the steps Rader recommends taking are having volunteers sign a general waiver and release that informs them about the possible hazards they may face. She also mentions having volunteers work with a buddy or a team so they are never alone.

All this seems very valuable for the performing arts. I have worked in places where volunteers have done everything from ushering to construction to driving farm tractors. There has been ample opportunity for them to injure themselves or each others. We rent our facility out to groups and have had other people’s volunteers damage equipment on a number of occasions for which we held the renter liable.

On the flip side, performance groups often don’t have their own facilities and have their volunteers meet them at an unfamiliar place like my theatre to help them put up a show. In such a situation, you are dependent on the performance facility’s maintenance program and good practices to keep your volunteers safe.

Volunteers

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Degree or Equivalent

May 9, 2011

by:

Joe Patti

The Americans for the Arts ArtsBlog had a contribution from Zack Hayhurst, a candidate for a Masters in Arts Administration at American University. His entry talks about the benefits an arts management degree confers as well as what it doesn’t.

One of the things he says it won’t do is be beneficial to those who already have an established arts management career.

“My own experience has been that those who come to the degree program with a few years of arts management experience under their belt, are likely left feeling under-challenged. The reason for this is not because what the programs teach is not valuable or correct, but because the perspective from which subjects are taught are often taught from an introductory perspective. This is fine for people like me; however, for someone who has worked in the field – who has dealt with boards, who has managed a strategic marketing plan – the academic instruction of these subjects might seem a little too, for lack of a better word, “academic.”’

His experience at American University may be quite different than what one might find at arts management programs in other places. I know at one time the Bolz Center at the University of Madison required people to have some professional experience before entering their program. From the bios of their current students, I assume that is still the case. They probably gear their instruction accordingly.

But something I have noticed fairly often these days is that arts management jobs are saying some sort of masters in arts or cultural management is a desirable qualification these days. In such a case, what is a person without such a degree to do? Often the position will mention equivalent experience as being acceptable, but I know many organizations, including my own, will put a lot more stock in the degree over the experience.

As a person with a masters in arts management I can say that a year of experience is probably more valuable than a year of instruction, though the instruction certainly shortened the learning curve in acquiring that experience. I suspect most people who have earned an arts management degree would say that more or less. So why is the degree valued so much more?

Well, it is much easier to quantify. With a degree, I know exactly what a job candidate was required to learn. I can’t know exactly what skills a person picked up in acquiring their experience. One person in a relatively unknown theatre in a Colorado might have taken a lot of initiative and performed the functions of many positions in the understaffed theatre and has an incredible depth of knowledge. Another person working in the same position title at Lincoln Center may have acquired fewer skills because they were never challenged to expand their role. How am I to know unless the person from Colorado does a super job of outlining this experience in a cover letter and resume? The applicant has to do a great job communicating and I have to commit to listening and reading between the lines carefully to get past the prestige of Lincoln Center.

But really, even if neither of these people worked at a Lincoln Center and I wasn’t familiar enough with any of the places on their resumes to know what was demanded of them, how do I choose between them? Maybe I don’t have to if someone else has a degree in arts administration and a little bit of practical experience. I have hired people on the basis of experience over degree and had to write a long justification pulling apart every applicable line on their resume to explain why it was just as good or better than a degree. Being relieved of this necessity can be a powerful incentive to favor a person with a degree. It may be fear of this situation that will drive people with respectable amount of experience to enter masters programs as they see more and more jobs listing a degree as a desired qualification.

The question is, will it be a boring, financially wasteful experience for these people, or will arts administration programs provide a sort of alternative track that Hayhurst alludes to? Perhaps more valuable to people with significant experience might be shorter certificate programs, that are not necessarily based in higher education, geared toward those of their status that can supplement their knowledge in areas where they are weaker. It would just be a matter of getting employers to recognize these as qualified certification of substantial ability.

Art(ist) Education, State of the Arts

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If The Kids Can Do It, So Can You!

May 4, 2011

by:

Joe Patti

So in a follow up to my post yesterday about giving people permission to express themselves, Daniel Pink posted today about a teacher who applied the idea of FedEx Day to instructing his sixth grade classroom. The teacher in question, Josh Stumpenhorst, called the effort “Innovation Day” and created an environment to let his students direct their learning for the day.

There was some prep work involved in getting the students focused and prepared for what they were going to do, of course. On the whole, it was pretty dang successful and the kids really got invested in the process. Among the projects the kids undertook were:

We had a student:

• Writing and performing his own guitar solo
• Creating a model out of wood of the Sears Tower
• Writing her own historical fiction short story
• Creating a Rube Goldberg machine
• Designing and creating a replica suit of Roman Armor (out of tinfoil and cardboard)
• Creating a how-to tutorial on baking a cake
• Painting a still life on canvas of a nature scene
• Writing and performing a one-man comedy act
• Researching and presenting on the concentration camps of the Holocaust
• Creating a video highlight reel of basketball moves and plays
• Building a model of the Leaning Tower of Pisa
• Writing a biography of his favorite teacher Mr. Stumpenhorst (<—–ok, I made this one up!)
• Creating a video documentary of Innovative Day
• Building a model of Big Ben
• Choreographing and performing a dance
• Researching Walt Disney and creating a model of the Epcot Center
• Creating a model of numerous World War II battles
• Building a model of the Eiffel Tower
• Researching and creating countless Power Points, posters, and Photo Stories

I wondered yesterday how an experience that cultivated a sense of permission to express oneself might be designed for adults. I think this project might be a good basis to start from, especially since there was a lot of natural collaboration emerging. Granted, these kids and teacher already had an existing daily relationship with each other in which there was a certain level of structure and trust. The same environment may not exist for an arts organization and a constituency that spends the majority of its day in school or at work. It might take some time and effort to get to this point–if you wanted to get to this point at all. A project that evolves in an entirely different direction based on the dynamics of the community is eminently possible.

Art(ist) Education, General Musings

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Permission to Express Yourself Is Granted

May 3, 2011

by:

Joe Patti

Our assistant theatre manager put a small mirror on his desk facing the door. I have no idea where he got it or why he put it there. As a bit of a joke, I put a piece of paper printed with the classic zen koan, “What was your face before your mother and father were born.” When people came in to buy tickets or meet with us, they look into the mirror and read the paper and often decide there is some great statement being made. It makes me reluctant to admit that I was making fun of attempts to manufacture profound statements like that.

But there is also the assumption that since we are an arts organization, we will surround ourselves with profound and nuanced statements. Even though we might get called out as elitist for attributing deeper meaning than is readily apparent, we still have permission to do nonsensical things in public and have it generally acceptable. I dare say it is expected.

I worked for an organization that ran a residential arts and music summer camp. Every year the kids would come in and let their hair down–many times quite literally– and include the liberal application of colored dye. During the rest of the year they felt like they had to subsume these impulses while in school and around their families. At camp, they were part of the normal group rather than the outsider.

That sense of permission to experiment and play is probably the biggest gift the arts can give people. I am still all for keeping the arts in schools and instilling people with the discipline and discernment to practice and experience the wide variety of arts in all disciplines. But failing that, if we can get people to realize they can have permission to express themselves, then there may be a small victory in it. And right now, we gotta take those small victories when we can find them.

Getting people’s butts in the seats is a short term solution to our problems, but I suspect that the arts needs to replace “if only they would come see our show, they would love it” with “if only they would try to create and express, they would love it.” The latter option is a lot more time and resource intensive a proposition though.

Confidence to step out and express oneself even in a formal setting is going to spring from increased mastery of one’s discipline. But most people probably aren’t going to have the time to devote to that. I have to think a shorter term hands-on encounter with creating art that teaches people that they have permission to experiment is going to be an important part of arts advocacy, especially if they spread the word and get friends involved. How do you present that in a balanced way? The usual approach with a lot of arts disciplines is that you have to master the rules before you can break them. It might be challenging to encourage people to have fun experimenting while instilling an understanding that there is still more to learn.

Actually, the best example I can think of is skateboarding. There is a lot of falling involved but the very people who are occasionally snickering at you when you fall are those providing you with the incentive to improve. I am not suggesting that derision be part of the approach an arts organization takes. But there may be something to an approach that creates informal cohorts of colleagues who are learning the “tricks” together. In such situations the gap in ability between members can often serve to motivate rather than intimidate, perhaps because everyone is enjoying the experience together.

No program is going to convert a large proportion of the population. Online content creation is produced by only a small percentage of people with a much larger proportion consuming it. On the other hand, that small proportion still accounts for a lot of people and the consumers for an even larger number. It could be that knowing you could create and participate if you wanted to even if you don’t, is empowering enough a concept to remove some of the intimidation factor of attending an arts event.

Of course, the expression is most accepted when a certain context is created. I don’t know anything about visual art, but my silly little display with the mirror is accepted in the context of an arts building. People working in the arts understand how to create that context regardless of the setting by manipulating mood and environmental factors. Perhaps greater success is to be found in teaching people how to do that along with formal performance techniques. By which I mean, give them the tools to create an environment in which self expression is acceptable.

As to how to accomplish all this as a practical matter, I don’t know. It may start with offering classes but ideally will expand beyond that in order to underscore the idea that expression can happen outside of a formal setting. You may dedicate your organization to creating opportunities now but not really feel that the concept has been realized in its fullest for 10 years. And at that point, people may decide that their favorite mode of expression doesn’t include your organization.

Yeah, I am not doing the best job of selling this, huh? But really, this is what we are asking of schools when we advocate for more arts education. We want them to create fallow ground in which we can cultivate patrons. Our mission statements say this is what our purpose is too, but really we want them to stick around. The most effective arts education programs in schools schools involve students in the arts experience rather than providing an experience. Perhaps where arts organizations have gone wrong is not providing enough opportunities for people to continue to be involved once they have left school.

General Musings

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