SLP Workshop Follow-Up: Working with Teen Volunteers

A great way for teens to be involved with your library is as volunteers!  This has the potential to hit many of those 40 Developmental Assets, and it can help you get things done that would be impossible without the help.  Here are some things discussed at the SLP workshop last month.

Perks for teens:

• T-shirts
• Community service hours (either court mandated, or needed for school or National Honor Society)
• Extra hours/lottery tickets for the volunteers (an hour of volunteering counts as the same as an hour of reading).

SLP jobs teens can help you do:

• Program assistants at programs for younger kids
• Help prepare craft, etc. materials for programs
• Help looking at reading records and distributing incentives
• Create decorations (Boyceville had an amazing teen SLP decoration committe)
• Reading buddies--act as one-on-one help for reading buddies.

Non-SLP jobs to consider:

Being part of a teen advisory board--meeting monthly, or even quarterly, to give you advice on developing relevant programs, services, collections for their peers.

In Menomonie, a teen volunteer who loves Pinterest is working on collecting all the boards of teens from Menomonie who pin, to create one big, local, teen-created pin-board.

In Baraboo, the teens help a lot with MOVING things, LIFTING things, and helping to

Have teens join you for Library Legislative Day! Senators and Assembly-people love to see engaged, active high school students, and the kids enjoy feeling empowered, talking about something they care about. Plus, a trip to Madison...hard to go wrong, there. This year, IFLS sponsored a bus trip to Library Legislative Day. It would have been great to have a busload, including lots of library-loving teens!

Managing the logistics:

• Keep track of teen volunteer hours
• Provide training
• Have kids fill out an application (see here for some examples)
• Penny recommended a subscription, at least for the summer, with www.volgistics.com to help keep large numbers of volunteers organized