Minstrel Staffing

First of all, I am sorry that I will not be able to join you this coming Tuesday, but I should be back in March.

Since many of you are volunteers, you will have received the letter that went out to volunteers delineating the changes that we are planning for March 1st. Basically we are hoping that by dividing up Head Staff into two positions generally people oriented vs. bookkeeping, and distributing some tasks differently among the remaining jobs, the job tasks will be divided more evenly, and there will be fewer "hard to fill" positions each week. So far I have received fairly positive feedback from several people as well as a few suggestions.

There are two suggestions that I think need to be taken seriously, and I will be open for ideas on how to resolve these:

1) There is concern that many people cannot sign up to volunteer because personal schedules make it difficult to show up in time, especially when so many of the jobs require that people show up early (and then stay late). The suggestion was that we divide some of the positions into set up and tear down. We have often done this with kitchen, which usually has two slots anyway, and it seems to work fairly well. Some of the other jobs might be more problematic to try to divide, and there is the concern of how many extra volunteers this would require each week.

2) The second concern is regarding sound and sound assist. I have heard many positive comments regarding our new training opportunities during Open Stage. Even so, more than one person has indicated their worry about training people for sound who are not strong enough to manage some of the heavier sound equipment. They may be absolutely qualified (after training) to run the sound board, but what if we end up with two women doing Sound and Sound Assist. This may sound sexist, but this could be a problem. I will state right here that there are pieces of the sound equipment that I would not even try to lift. Would we need to add a second sound assistant in this case who would be willing to do the heavy toting and lifting?

Before March 1, I will be sending out another letter reminding people about expected arrival times and other hot tips (like how many servings are expected when you sign up to bake). I've had reports recently that bakers have shown up with barely 12 severing, and the Head Staff had to rush out to pick up some cookies to cover the evening.

A more long term goal is to rewrite all the job descriptions to reflect the new changes and hopefully figure out a way to make them available online for reference to anyone who is interested.

Best wishes for a productive meeting, and I will see you in March if not before.