Last Monday, we suggested 5 unlikely volunteers to help you with your youth retreat – today we give you five more:
1) First aider – Safety is an area of the youth retreat to give serious consideration. If you’re the main person in charge, we’d highly recommend becoming first aid trained yourself. The Red Cross provide first aid courses all over the country – their website will help you to find one close to you.
However, if you nor any of your volunteers are first aid trained and there isn’t time to organize this, is there anybody else you know who has this training? They wouldn’t necessarily need to be involved with any youth work – you could just ask them if they’d be willing to be on site in case there are any medical issues.
If the retreat center you book is more of an activity center, there’s a good chance their staff will be first aid trained, so you may not need to bring along a dedicated first aider. Don’t leave this to chance though – check with the retreat center if their staff are first aid trained and if they’d always be available in an emergency.
2) Administrator for registration and feedback – Administration isn’t everybody’s gifting. If paperwork isn’t your strong suit, try to identify someone who’d be willing to take care of the youth retreat registration. They could deal with the registration forms, taking money, providing receipts, etc, freeing you up to focus on other areas.
This person could also be in charge of getting feedback after the youth retreat. We’ve covered youth work session evaluations a number of times before, so check out those posts for some ideas of how you could get feedback at the end of the youth retreat.
3) Photographer – Having a photographer with a good quality camera at the youth retreat can be very beneficial. They can take photos and video footage which can be used for a photo/video montage at the end of the youth retreat. The photos can also be uploaded to your website afterwards (if the youth retreat or your youth group has one), shown to parents to give them an idea of what happened at the retreat and used to promote the next youth retreat.
4) Donors – I don’t mean people need to give up their kidneys for the youth retreat. If some (or all) of the young people you work with are from low-income families, they might not be able to afford to attend the youth retreat without financial help. Are there any people in your community, church, workplace, etc, who’d be willing to sponsor a place on the youth retreat to enable a young person to go?
Many people are very interested in youth work and youth ministry, even if they don’t want to do the actual youth work themselves. This can be a great way for them to contribute to the lives of young people.
5) Drivers – Youth retreats will often be some distance from your local community. Rather than having parents drop off their children at the youth retreat center, you may instead wish to have all the youth meet at one location in your local area, then transport them all by minibus, minivan, carpool, etc.
**We’ve now published a book to help anyone planning a youth retreat. Find out more about How To Plan A Youth Retreat here**
Question: What other jobs can you think of that youth retreat volunteers could help with? Share your ideas in the comments below.
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