My Soapbox Rant About Empowering Volunteers

Yesterday I gave you some of my favorite snippets and takeaways from the 2013 Middle School Ministry Campference. I hope you checked it out because, seriously, there was a heck of a lot of goodness in those notes.

Now, to keep the Campference conversation going, I want to tell you about a little Campference tradition that I got to be a part of this year: the Soapbox Sessions. Apparently, every year, Marko asks a handful of Campference people to give quick little 5-minute “soapbox rants” in response to this question:

“What is one thing you wish every middle school youth worker would stop doing, or start doing, or understand?”

And, this year, he asked me to get in on it.

So here’s my response, inspired by my 5-minute Campference Soapbox Rant.

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HOW TO | Make a Sweet Volunteer Wall

Ok reader friends, we’re back with just two more installments in this “How to Make Your Office Awesome” series. So far, I’ve shared some tips for de-cluttering your workspace, a tutorial on how to make a wooden pallet wall, a tutorial on how to make yourself some custom dry erase boards, and a tutorial on how to make a t-shirt wall.

And today, I want to give you a peek at my favorite part of my whole office, because it’s super functional and it looks pretty cool, too.

MY VOLUNTEER WALL.

32e3I oversee all the volunteer development, training, and care for our Middle School Ministry, so it was really important to me to have a big statement piece in my office that was all about them. I wanted something that would help me remember practical things, like who was serving where, but I also wanted something that would help me remember why I do what I do.

So I decided to put all of my volunteers’ pretty little faces up on my wall. (Aren’t they so cute?)

Let me tell you what you’re looking at, and then I’ll tell you how to make it.

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