[QUOTE=beowulf;8743877]
treating volunteers well is saying “thank you so much for helping” with a smile and a nod - it is not providing you food, water, or shirts.
i’m glad you’re volunteering because i love this sport and appreciate other volunteers, but you are going to be sorely disappointed if you expect a sandwich every time you go out.
have you ever orchestrated a show? it is very expensive and time consuming to make lunch for ~50 people. maybe next time you be in charge of the making lunch if you want to ensure it happens. $500 for a cater for these people is expensive. most shows do not have that budget. have you ever been in charge of any sort of show’s finance? seen how little money shows make after the fact? how much money the officials are paid? maybe the huge venues make $20,000 but around here (and we are in the same area, area 1) most of them don’t make much profit at all. what money they make immediately goes into the upkeep of the facility which is not cheap.
how about how expensive all the show equipment is - the railings for rings, jumps, cross country fences, reseeding/repairing the turf, landscaping, etc. these things are NOT cheap and the profits from shows go to improving the facility, not padding someone’s pockets. after the show, the cleanup is incredible; i have personally seen the amount of money it takes to ‘restore’ a venue and $20,000 is not nothing after you factor in tractor/farm equipment, labor, removal, landscaping, repairs to fences, jump maintenance, ring maintenance, etc.
i only ask these things because i’ve been on that end of the stick with show organizers - it is so exhausting and time consuming volunteering to organize these events and while it is nice to have a lunch there for all volunteers (in a perfect world i’d pay for five star catering for them) sometimes it is not economically feasible.
obviously for big events where they make more money, it is certainly a consideration… but throwing show organizers over the coals at smaller venues for not providing a lunch is not that far from entitlement. i’ve volunteered at almost every venue in area 1 and almost all of them provided water and at least chips/snacks. the smaller venues just don’t have the budget to support catering companies for volunteers - if they did, they wouldn’t need the volunteers in the first place.[/QUOTE]
Yes, I have done financials for an event. Several times. And I’ve listened to a whole lot of complaining from all sides about the financials of eventing.
I still maintain that feeding people as a thank you for their time, as would be expected in basically any other situation, is not going to be what bankrupts events. Offering a schooling pass costs the event literally nothing. But if you were going to ask your friends to help you build a deck for a day in the sun, would you really not feed them and expect a head pat and a “hey thanks!” To be sufficient?
If 100 people enter an event at $195 each, you have just been paid $19,500 in cash, so all the events you are talking about do bring in that kind of money.
I always find it interesting that the events that cry poverty are NOT the destination events who must support the grounds solely with entries from one event a year. It’s always the people running an operating boarding business saying that events don’t make them enough money. Funny, I would have thought that the costs of maintaining that facility would have been borne by the people using it every day. But nope, we need free labor.
ETA: Janet and I are on the same page, obviously. I’ve volunteered at many small venues that are VERY generous with their volunteers, and large ones which abuse them.
