The charity volunteering I do involves a lot of driving. The organization can afford to pay for gas, but the volunteer coordinator refuses to accept claims. Should they reimburse us? Or should we have a stipend from which to pay our expenses?

Each organization should have and follow a policy on volunteer expenses. If there is a written document, you should be given a copy on request. If the policy allows for some expenses to be covered, there should be a budget for that, and a procedure that you can follow, if appropriate.

If there is no policy, the volunteer coordinator can recommend one, but should not have the authority to approve one. Paying for volunteer expenses could be a significant expense, and the executive director would likely want to bring this to the board of directors, especially if it would cause a budget variance. Besides, the board members are volunteers too, and the policy would have to address their expenses, so it would partly be a board operations policy. However, the board members need not be treated the same way as other volunteers, provided any difference can be justified using the ethical values and principles of the organization. Choosing to reimburse volunteer expenses is a significant decision that requires serious discussion at the leadership level; once an organization starts to pay, it is very difficult to change back.

If an organization does have some monies in hand, they still may have other anticipated expenses or upcoming capital needs. Or they may be predicting a decrease in donations; most charities are rightly worried about this given the economic downtown. So a small surplus now may be critical in order to offset an expected deficit next year.

That said, many organizations that can find the monies to reimburse volunteers do so for at least certain types of expenses, such as accommodation. They wish to be fair, and to attract and retain volunteers from all socio-economic levels. Volunteers who can afford to forego the reimbursement may choose not to claim, or to donate the money back (the latter allows for better tracking of the cost of the volunteer program). Clearly this is the better approach, as otherwise the volunteer program is not inclusive of people living in poverty who may have time available to give back to the community organizations that help them or have helped in the past. And certainly such reimbursement matters more in organizations where volunteers incur significant and frequent expenses, than in those where volunteers just have an occasional easy drive to their meetings or volunteer service. I live in Toronto and see charities giving out tokens for public transit, accepted only by the volunteers who are homeless or living on very tight budgets.

However, I have seen many organizations that would go under if they had to pay volunteer expenses. One reason that volunteers are not reimbursed is that funders and donors may not see the expense as important or appealing. Many of them would not find gas money an issue, and would not think about those it deters.

For more guidance, let’s look at the Canadian Code for Volunteer Involvement, developed in partnership with the Canadian Administrators of Volunteer Resources (CAVR). Your organization may have adopted the code. If not, a discussion of the code would be an excellent way to start any review of volunteer management policies. Your volunteer coordinator may also belong to CAVR or to a provincial or regional group of professional managers of volunteer resources where he or she can get advice from colleagues and from the professional standards of practice.

One of the two guiding principles in the code is: “Volunteers have rights. Voluntary organizations recognize that volunteers are a vital human resource and will commit the appropriate infrastructure to support volunteers.” This statement is intended to guide the discussions at board and management tables about what the appropriate infrastructure is. There is nothing explicit in the code about expense reimbursement. Your organization has taken the key step of having a position of volunteer coordinator. This shows they recognize that volunteer recruitment, orientation, training, recognition, and other such functions are needed in order to make volunteer involvement effective. Having this position is a key assignment of organizational resources to volunteer involvement.

If you are able to spur a discussion at the board table, and the organization decides to start making reimbursements available, remember that resources will still have to be found and allocated in relation to other priorities. You might consider helping with fundraising activities.

You also ask about a stipend for a volunteer, as agricultural societies sometimes give. When I was growing up, everyone in my family volunteered at the fall fair, and got coupons for a Chinese restaurant as our only reimbursement. I know that the term “volunteer” does get used even for people who are paid a fee, but to me they are no longer a volunteer. They are fee-for-service providers accepting payments below market rate because they wish to support a cause. A stipend or honorarium needs to be reported as income, by the way. I know my views will not change the common references to paid “volunteer” firefighters, describing people whose primary role and income is not firefighting. If they like the term, I am happy to let them use it – their work is vital to their communities.

Most nonprofits in Canada do not pay a stipend to any volunteer and are unlikely to ever start. In some provinces, it is not legal to make such payments to board members of a charity. Even where stipends or per diems are legal, I question the ethical basis. Such payments set a value on some uses of time above others, usually without any discussion or justification or the normal care taken to choose a supplier.

In summary, your organization should have a discussion on resources to support volunteering if it has not already done so. If it continues to ask you to donate your vehicle expenses, and you do not wish to do so, I can only suggest that you look at other volunteer opportunities within the organization or elsewhere in your community.

Since 1992, Jane Garthson has dedicated her consulting and training business to creating better futures for our communities and organizations through values-based leadership. She is a respected international voice on governance, strategic thinking and ethics. Jane can be reached at jane@garthsonleadership.ca.

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