Managing Child Volunteers in Your Library

Writing on behalf of the Managing Children’s Services Committee today, I am taking this opportunity to start a conversation on what I feel can be an overlooked management duty: overseeing child volunteers. While this task is certainly rewarding and often times extremely entertaining, overseeing what is most likely a young person’s first experience in a service environment can be a challenge to even seasoned managers. If your library does not currently host a child volunteer program, know that finding a balance of tasks that are interesting to the volunteer, beneficial to your library program, and developmentally appropriate can seem overwhelming, but the payoff for both the volunteer and your library’s overall services can be tremendous. In my work in different types of children’s libraries, I’ve managed both children seeking volunteer service hours and children that just want to learn more about the inner workings of their favorite space, and I’ve learned a little along the way. Here are three tips on making the most of your time while managing your littlest helpers.

• Be sure to follow all library procedures. This sounds like a no-brainer. But you may be approached by familiar parents who want to leave their very mature child with you at the library, despite the fact that this child is under the age that your library allows patrons to be unattended by an adult. Consider offering a parent/child collaborative volunteer opportunity, while gently reminding the family that while you appreciate the offer to help, library policies must be followed. As with adult volunteers, be sure to collect all necessary intake paperwork for any young volunteer, even if accompanied by a guardian in the library.
•  Offer a volunteer program. As a newbie librarian, I sometimes felt overwhelmed when approached by children wanting to become library volunteers. While trying to balance an already hectic schedule as a new manager, finding the time to both train volunteers and come up with new and exciting tasks for each individual daily left me feeling drained rather than refreshed by the offer of help. This changed when my library started offering a Junior Friends of the Library group, where regularly scheduled group meetings with planned volunteer activities both offered volunteer hours to interested parties AND allowed library staff plenty of time to prepare for projects and provide scheduled small group interaction with young volunteers while collaborating on projects.
• Offer both routine tasks and opportunities for independent creative work. While working in an elementary library as the solo library employee, I was advised to utilize student volunteers to help with book shelving. I was excited to find that children were eager to volunteer after school, but realized that the children quickly got bored with the same routine tasks every visit. In what I considered a lazy attempt on my part to spice up the volunteer tasks one day, I simply gave each volunteer a blank sticky note and asked them to create a book recommendation display. This ended up not only being a volunteer favorite activity, but a wonderful boost in circulation for sometimes overlooked titles. This simple peer-to-peer recommendation shelf greatly enhanced our library program, but it wouldn’t have been possible without my student volunteers.

Your turn! What has your experience managing child volunteers looked like? Challenges? Successes? Let us hear your ideas for improvement on managing child volunteers in the comments below.
Today’s guest blogger is Amanda Yother, a life-long library lover. She has worked as a children’s services coordinator in a public library, as a school library media specialist in an elementary school, and is currently working as a regional librarian in Cookeville, Tennessee.

Amanda is writing on behalf of ALSC’s Managing Children’s Services Committee. Please note that as a guest post, the views expressed here do not represent the official position of ALA or ALSC.