Volunteer management - VM - M - 1.04 - motivation, know staff

One of the very common questions that recruiters and human resources people are taught to ask in interviews is what I call the "what do you want to be when you grow up" question.  Usually this is phrased as "where do you see yourself in five (or ten or twenty) years."  The reason that recruiters are taught to ask this question is to see if someone has a career plan.

Most of the time, and particularly in my field of work, it's a pretty stupid question.

Now, there are some people, like Chris Hadfield, who had a career plan.  They followed it, and they got to where they wanted to go.  Chris Hadfield wanted to be an astronaut.  There is a pretty common career path to follow if you want to be an astronaut.  However, very few people actually get to *be* astronauts.  And I'm absolutely certain there are quite a number of people who, like Chris Hadfield, wanted to be an astronaut, and followed the plan, and never did, actually, get into space.

My field is information technology.  Information technology changes.  New types of technology are discovered, or created.  Software is developing all the time.  Hardware, possibly in its basics, still mostly follows the von Neumann architecture, as it has for the past seventy years.  However, we are now coming into a major change in technology with regard to quantum computing, and so, once again, not only the software, and the means of developing software, but the actual hardware platforms are going to radically change.

In information technology, constant change is here to stay.

When I started to work with computers, I didn't even know that there was a thing called information security.  And I have worked for a great many technology companies over the course of my career.  Even within information security, I have specialized in different domains at different times.  I didn't plan it.  I had no idea, for the most part, specifically where my career was going to go.  For the past 40 years, I could have described myself as a systems analyst.  But the systems, and the type of analysis that I did on them, changed constantly.  I suppose that my career plan could best be described as I see the next problem, and I solve it.  While it has worked for me, it isn't exactly a plan that allows you to give details of what you are going to do in even five years, let alone twenty.

If I am honest (which I do not feel obliged to be with anyone foolish enough to ask this idiotic type of question) I have never had a career plan.  Not in the way that the recruiters seem to see it.

Okay, this is a very long-winded way of leading into the fact that you have to know your volunteers.  Yes, as Pfeffer said in "The Human Equation," you have to know your people; both your customers, and your employees; in any business enterprise.  You have to know the strengths, and the aspirations, of your employees.  You probably don't have to guide them, but you may get better results out of them if you direct the area that they might next want to work in, and ensure that that particular field is something that they are good at, and interested in.

But it is much, *much* more important in volunteer management.

In business management, your employees are there because they want a job.  They want to get paid.  They want to be in a business, where they can make contacts, for other types of work, and other types of jobs, if they aren't particularly satisfied with the one that they are working in now.

That is not the case with volunteers.  You are not paying them.  They don't need a job, if they are willing to work for you, for nothing.  They don't need the money.  They don't necessarily need another job.  (If you are a fortunate enough to have young volunteers, who are looking for contacts to get into the job market, then well and good.  But realize that those particular volunteers, are, basically, looking to get a job which is going to ensure that they don't have time to work for you.)

Some of your volunteers may have too much time on their hands, and are looking for something to do to fill their hours.  However, in the first place, in our fast-paced modern society, those people are extremely rare.  In the second place, if that is why they are volunteering for you, they could easily turn around and volunteer for somebody else who *does* pay attention to them.

All of which is by way of saying that you need, really *really* need, to get you to know your volunteers.  Get to know why they are working for your particular organization.  Is it a really desperate desire to address the need that your organization fulfills?  Are they interested in the need that you're organization is devoted to, or are they primarily there for the camaraderie and fellowship of their colleagues who are also working to address that objective?  Are they just filling in time?  Are they particularly interested in the task that you have them doing?  Are they interested in having a regular time of volunteering, every week at the same day and time?  Are they interested in doing a variety of jobs, and learning something new all the time?  Are they interested in one particular task, and only one particular task, regardless of the needs of the organization?  Do they get along with their volunteer colleagues?  Is there something that they would rather be doing, and are you just the closest thing to what they actually want to do?

You need to know the answer to all of these questions, and more, to ensure that you can motivate them to help with the tasks that the organization needs to have done.

Volunteer management - VM - 0.00 - introduction and table of contents

https://fibrecookery.blogspot.com/2025/05/volunteer-management-vm-000.html

Grief cliches (4)

Read books on grief and loss

Yes.  With some provisos.

Grief can be the weirdest thing that you have ever encountered, particularly since our society refuses to talk about it.  It can make you feel like you might be going crazy.  Getting some information on what grief is, and what you might expect, is probably a very good thing.  Yes, you can get help from grief counsellors, and grief support groups, but there are some problems.  It's hard to tell whether counsellors actually have experience with, or training in, grief, aside from those who do work with hospice societies.  Those who do work with hospice societies tend to be in high demand, so you may have a long wait time to get started.  Grief support groups are more available, but many societies running the groups have requirements that you have had at least some counselling before getting into a group, so, once again, there may be a delay in availability.

Books are immediately available.  But, like counsellors, it can be difficult to tell which books can be helpful, just because it has "grief" in the title.  As a resource for the hospice society for which I volunteer, I have started a bibliography of grief books (as well as bibliographies for caregiving and end-of-life care).  All of the titles listed in the bibliographies have full reviews linked to them, so that you can get details of what the books might be good for.

Eat healthy

Yeah, it's a good idea.  But possibly easier said than done.

Yes, any major disturbance in your life, and grief is definitely a disturbance, requires that you have the best physical resources that you can.  This includes health, this includes sleep, and this includes a healthy diet.  Yes, diet and exercise is generally helpful in pretty much any situation.  So, yes, eat healthy is not exactly bad advice.

However, simply saying eat healthy may not be terribly helpful to a lot of people.  We are, after all, talking about grief here.  And, specifically for men, you may never have had to consider what a healthy diet is.  If you are grieving because you have lost your wife, you may have lost the person who has cooked for you, for possibly the majority of your life.  So, how are you supposed to even know what a healthy diet is?

And, as someone who does know how to cook, and who did the majority of the cooking during the time of our marriage, I can tell you that eating healthy, and preparing healthy meals, is harder than it sounds.  If you are grieving, very likely you are at least partially depressed, and you are probably having difficulty just getting through the day.  In the initial stages of grief, you are using pretty much all of the energy and resources that you have, just grieving, and surviving the grief.  You don't have time to think about meals.  You don't have the energy to consider, in detail, how to eat, and what kind of a diet is best for you.  And, certainly, you want to take the easiest path to having a meal.

The easiest path, unfortunately, isn't particularly healthy.

Our society provides us with quick and easy meals, that aren't particularly healthy.  Overly processed food is readily available, and it tends to be fairly cheap, partly because it also tends to have a long shelf life, and therefore it's easy to manage it once you buy it and get it home.  You can simply open a box, or a bag, or a package, and start eating.  A lot of the stuff doesn't need to be refrigerated, and, even after you open a bag, it can stay on the shelf after you have satisfied your immediate hunger, until the next time you are hungry.

But, while it is easy, and relatively inexpensive, and easy to manage, in terms of being available when you are hungry, it's not a healthy diet.

It tends to be high in starch, and sugar, and salt, and the types of fats that aren't particularly good for you.

Healthy foods tend to be vegetables.  They also tend to be fresh.  Even when they are prepared, in some way, that gives them a longer shelf life, they, those materials, because they are nutritious, tend to grow things that are bad for you, like mold.  These types of foods, that are good for you, tend to go bad, over time.  They tend to have to be refrigerated.  You have to remember when you bought them.  You have to keep checking them, to see how old they are.  You also have to keep checking them to see if they are growing mold, or smelling bad.

They also tend to be more expensive.  Because they tend to go bad, they have a shelf life, and because they have a shelf life, they have greater requirements for being freshly harvested, prepared, and shipped to market.  And all of that costs money.  So food that is healthy for you tends to be more expensive than food that isn't particularly good for you.

And food that is good for you tends to have to be prepared.  You need to have a variety of foods to have a healthy diet.  Even if you are eating vegetables, and a lot of vegetables can be eaten raw, they still have to be peeled, and scraped, or scrubbed, and cut up into bite sized pieces.  So food that is healthy for you tends to be a lot more trouble to prepare.

This is hard, and it takes effort.

And then there's even more effort in figuring out what mix of foods, all of which require different preparation methods, you should be eating in order to have a healthy diet.

So, yes, eating healthy is a good idea.  But just saying to people "eat healthy" isn't particularly helpful.

Take a road trip

In general this would seem to come under the category of a distraction.  And, as I have pointed out, a distraction, and anything that might be pleasurable, is probably good.

It's also something new.  Going on a trip generally gives you something new to see, or encounter, or experience.  And anything new, and learning anything new, is probably a good idea.  You are faced with an entirely new situation, and your life has changed from what it was.  Learning something new helps you in the process of learning a new life.  It's practice for building a new life, and so it's helpful in that regard.

But simply, randomly, going on a road trip, or taking a vacation, or even going to visit friends or family, can be really difficult.  After Gloria died, a lot of people suggested that I take various types of trips.  A relative who really liked going on cruise ships suggested that I go on a cruise.  I'd never gone on a cruise in my life, either with Gloria, or before I met her.  I (still) have no idea of what to do or expect on a cruise.  Other friends kept on inviting me to come and stay with them.  Yes, I'm sure that going to see them, in their home, which I hadn't been to, would have provided some new sensations.  But it also means that I have to move, I have to plan the trip, I have to do the actual traveling, and then I'm stuck in their situation, and their schedule of life, and I'm already facing a major change in my *own* life.  I don't look forward to putting in an awful lot of effort, and then being stuck for several days following someone else's rules and ideas of how you should live.  I am already in a situation where the way I thought life should work isn't working.

One cousin did come to visit.  And then suggested that they wanted to go on a road trip to somewhere nearby.  It's definitely a tourist destination, and, in fact, even though it was only a couple of hours drive, I hadn't gone there.  They invited me to come along.  That way I didn't have to do anything.  I just had to sit in the car for the ride.  They did the driving, and it was only going to be a day trip, so it wasn't any major commitment of time.  I enjoyed it.  It was very nice of them.

So, yes, some type of trip could be helpful.  As a distraction, or simply for the novelty of it, and the practice in encountering new situations and adapting to them.

But, as with so many other items on this list, it's easy to say, and not so easy to do.

And, once again, it would be very nice for somebody to do this for you, but it's harder than it sounds to do it for yourself.

Learn a new skill

Yes, this is a good idea.

As I say, you are facing a change in your life.  Probably a very major change in your life.  Doing anything new helps with what psychologists call neuroplasticity.  This is the ability of your brain to adapt to know skills, new situations, new requirements; pretty much anything new in your life.  Building neuroplasticity by learning something new is a good idea.  It will help you adapt to your new life situation.

(And, once again, it might be easier to say than to do.  So, don't beat yourself up if you can't do it right away.)

Focus on what’s left, not what’s lost

Okay, in general, possibly a good thing.  Being positive (or, more importantly, not constantly dwelling on the negative), is, overall, a good thing.  If you can do it.

But this is just *way* too close to toxic positivity for me to recommend it to anyone who is actually grieving.

Grief topics: https://fibrecookery.blogspot.com/2025/06/grief-table-of-contents-and-resources.html

Volunteer management - VM - G - 2.02 - governance - policy

All of you will have policies for your volunteers.  You probably have policy manuals for your volunteers.  (Probably buried somewhere in a desk.)  You will have policy and procedures manuals.  Disregarded behind the mops.

This tends to be the attitude towards policy.  It's something that you are supposed to have.  Managers tend to like policies more than the volunteers do.  According to the managers, policy is a way that you can get back at the volunteers, or possibly discipline them, or make their life difficult if they aren't doing what you want.  According to the volunteers, policies are pointless exercises imposed on them for no particular reason, probably made up by someone who has absolutely no idea what goes on in the organization.

Policies are important.  Policies are, in fact, vital.  It's just that the policies that are really used by the organization tend not to be the policies that are actually written down in the policy manual.

The policies are, in fact, the rules governing the organization.  They should, and all too often do not, derive from the mission statement of the organization.  The policies should outline what you must do, what you should do, and what you can't do.  That is the way the policies should be written.

Unfortunately, even for the managers, the actual writing down of the policy is given short shrift, and the policies are not well thought out.  If you are new to volunteer management, you should pull the policy manual out, and go through it with a very heavy red pen.  If you have the opportunity to be the first manager in a volunteer organization, you should be giving significant thought to writing down your policies.  Write down, as I have noted, what has to be done, what should be done, and what can't be done.  And be very careful when you are thinking about them.

Absolutely crucial to crafting your policies is: never create a policy with which the volunteers cannot comply.

Your policies should be, as I have noted, the rules for work and behavior in the organization.  This should give your volunteers guidance on what they are to do, and what they aren't to do.  The policies, therefore, have to be possible.  If you write down a policy which the volunteers either cannot accomplish, or cannot comply with, or a policy that actually impedes them performing the actual objectives of the organization, you are doing something that is worse than useless.  It is one thing to write up a policy which doesn't give guidance, or failing to write a policy that gives guidance.  If you fail to write a policy, that means that the volunteers don't get the help that they should really be expecting from you in performing their tasks and objectives.  But if you write a policy that they can't comply with, that means that, in the normal operation and work for the organization, they are continually breaking that policy.  The reason that that policy is worse than useless is that it requires the volunteers to break policy.  If they are required to break one policy, they start to build an attitude that the policies are of no importance.  Not only are they useless, but they actually get in the way of pursuing the objectives of the organization.  Therefore, in the volunteer's minds, the policies become pointless.  If you have to break one policy, you are much more likely to break other policies, because policy becomes what people all too often seem to assume that they are; not something to help, but something that actually gets in the way of doing your job.

So don't do that.  Never create a policy with which the volunteers cannot comply.

And this should guide your creation of any and all policies.  When you craft a policy, make sure that the volunteers can always comply with it.  Make sure that the volunteers are never going to be put in the situation of deciding whether or not to comply with the policy.  The policy should be there for a reason, and it should be there to protect the organization, to further the tasks and objectives of the organization , to protect the safety of your volunteers, or to protect other assets of the organization.  But, when writing down the policy, make sure that the way that the policy is written doesn't unnecessarily interfere with the actual tasks and objectives that the volunteers are going to be pursuing.

I have had a fair amount of practice in writing policies and procedures.  And it's not easy.  It can get pretty complicated, when you have something that you know should be forbidden or prevented, but, if you fail to word the policy properly, you can write yourself into a corner, and set up a situation where the workers in the organization can't do their jobs, and still work within the restriction that the policy creates.  You may have to think of a lot of different scenarios, and try to think of reasons that someone might want to break your policy, as it is written, which means that you need to rewrite the policy, protecting the real reason for the prohibition, but allowing real work to continue.

I well recall one situation where a policy, in the organization that I was a part of, came down stating that we were not to use software in our office, and in our organization, that had not been paid for.  This is, one would think, a relatively good idea.  We do not want people bringing in pirated software, and possibly getting us into legal trouble.  Depending on the type of organization that we're working in, we may want not want to have unauthorized software in our organization, because of the danger of insecure software operating within our systems.  However, my position in the organization one of my tasks was to review software, in order to determine suitable software to purchase.

So, how was I supposed to obtain review software?  Normally, software companies were only too happy to provide us free software for review.  After all, I was working for a very large entity, and they knew that, if I was happy with the software, they were going to get enormous numbers of orders for that software.  But, if we were not to use software that had not been purchased, I couldn't ask for free review software anymore.

The project of reviewing software had no budget.  And, given the size of the entity I was working for, and the various other policies in regard to budgeting and purchasing, the ability to temporarily purchase software, for review, and then return the software having done the review, would have required an absolutely enormous budget, even with the fact that the software was being returned, and the purchase price refunded back.  The purchasing policies for this particular enterprise were not intended to cover this kind of activity, and, in fact, the fact that purchases were not final would, because of other policies, have a negative effect on my office's overall budget.  It was a real mess.  And, basically, we had to stop the review project.  Which probably didn't do the enterprise any good.

So, be very careful about the unintended consequences of your policies.  You may have to discuss projected policies, and the specifics, and wording, of the proposed policy, in order to make sure that it doesn't create a problem for someone, or some activities, within your organization.  Policy is important.  It provides the direction, for the objectives and tasks for your organization.  Policy needs to be followed.  So make sure that you don't create policies that your people cannot follow.

Volunteer management - VM - 0.00 - introduction and table of contents

https://fibrecookery.blogspot.com/2025/05/volunteer-management-vm-000.html

Lines ...

Well, I got all excited what with them tearing down the telephone pole, right beside a nice, torn up road that they still haven't paved yet, and could easily install some conduit to bury the lines that run right through the second best view in Port Alberni, but they just put up a new pole ...

Grief cliches (3)

Help others

I would, pretty much unreservedly, recommend this one.

I have always done volunteer work.  I have always had a number of different reasons, and benefits, for people to do volunteer work.  Not only does it help the community, and specifically those in need, but it also helps the volunteer.

In terms of grief, it definitely helps to get some kind of distraction. A very good distraction is stopping thinking about *your* problems, and think about somebody *else's* problems.  Specifically, trying to help somebody else with their problems.  So, yes, help others.  Volunteer.  There are all kinds of opportunities to volunteer, and find out any way you can.

Sleep

Okay, this one is particularly stupid. 

Grief is not a thing, but a syndrome.  It is a collection of characteristics and symptoms.  The symptoms will vary from person to person.  Everyone grieves in their own way, as we keep on trying to tell people.  There isn't any twelve-step plan, or five stage process, or timeline as to how long before you stop grieving.  (You actually never do stop grieving.)

But there are symptoms and characteristics that are fairly common to most people who are grieving.  And number one, the one that affects the most people, in the most cases, is sleep disturbance.  This can be sleeping too much, in which case telling you to sleep is pretty stupid, or it may be the fact that you cannot get enough sleep, in which case telling people to sleep is pretty stupid.

Take time for short term distractions

Yes, once again, I would think that this is a pretty good one. Grief consumes you.  Everybody thinks it shouldn't, but it does.  Now you do have to do a certain amount of grief work.  How much, and what type, depends on you, and can't be predicted or prescribed.  But you do have to grieve, a certain amount, and at certain times.  And that's okay, and in fact it's kind of required.

But pretty much any distraction that you can get, to keep from the grief consuming you completely, is a good thing.  Anything that you can enjoy, that will distract you, go for it.  Okay, maybe there are some provisos.  Sometimes your grief, and the cognitive impairment that comes along with you, can make it really difficult to know what's good for you, and what, in fact, you actually do want.  So, there are some distractions that can be damaging.

And, very often, you will find that the things that you used to enjoy, that gave you pleasure, that you used as distractions prior to your bereavement, just don't work anymore.  I used to watch a lot of movies with Gloria.  We really enjoyed them.  After she died, I found that movies, and TV shows, were incredibly annoying.  I still watch pretty much most of the movies that I watch in a setting, on the DVD player, that plays them about a third faster than they're supposed to be run.  As a matter of fact, an awful lot of movies I play at with the subtitles on, and at the level one fast forward setting, which still allows me to read the subtitles.  That runs the movies about in about half the time that they are supposed to run.  I'm getting better, and things that I record on the TV I can generally accommodate at regular speed, since the settings on recording things off the TV don't allow me to do that fast forward stuff that I do with DVDs.  But I don't get the same level of enjoyment and distraction out of movies as I used to.

I have read all my life, and enjoyed reading.  I read pretty much everything, and an awful lot of different things for enjoyment.  When Gloria died, I stopped reading.  Not entirely.  I still read a ton of stuff for research and learning.  But I have to be really careful, these days, in terms of what I read for pleasure.  Reading doesn't distract me anymore.  It's very weird, because I read for my whole life, before I met Gloria, and while I was married to Gloria.  So having this distraction not be available to me, or having to be really careful about what books I choose to read for pleasure and distraction, is really kind of bizarre.

So, yes, distract yourself. If you can.

Grief topics: https://fibrecookery.blogspot.com/2025/06/grief-table-of-contents-and-resources.html

Volunteer management - VM - M - 1.2 - motivation, basics

I have said that volunteer management is somewhat distinct from business management.  Probably the most important distinction is that of motivation.  In terms of business management, most managers seem to take the attitude (which may or may not be correct) that motivation consists in either providing, or threatening, the workers paycheque.  You can't do that when you are managing a volunteer labor force.  You aren't paying them.

There are a variety of motivations for volunteers to do volunteer work.  Thus, the question of motivation, and therefore the overall question of management, can become extremely complex.  However, most volunteers are volunteering because they see a job that needs to be done, and are willing to do it.  Therefore, the motivation of volunteers lies primarily in assuring, and reassuring, the volunteers that the work that they are doing is important, and that you, yourself, as their manager, are pursuing the same goal.

Sometimes volunteers, and managers, can see the same objective, but may not be pursuing it in the same way.  This is an added complication to the managing of volunteers, but we will leave this for the moment, and address it later.

The first thing that I want to say to volunteer managers is: be honest.  With yourself.

As I said, volunteers are motivated by seeing a need, or he needed task, and the belief that they are filling a need, or performing an important task which, otherwise, would go unfulfilled.

There are two areas that you need to address in this regard.  One is to reinforce the idea that the work that the volunteers are performing is, in fact, important.  There are two ways to address this, which are implemented in quite different ways.  The first is the simple assertion that their work is important.  But the stock repetition of the bald phrase, "your work is important," is not sufficient.  If it keeps on being repeated, word for word, without any kind of support, it loses meaning.  Once it loses meaning, so does their work.  That's a bad thing.

You need to support the view that the work is important by doing research.  Different kinds of research.  Provide different kinds of evidence that their work is important.  Show the number of hours that the volunteers have put into a given task, in total, over a given period.  Find out the number of people who have been directly, and positively, affected.  Wherever possible, provide an anecdote of some individual (yes, be careful not to identify the individual, but make sure that the story is real) who has been helped, and how they have been helped.  Wherever possible, provide, or copy, to the members of your volunteer corps, any cards and letters from those who have been helped, thanking them for their help.  Find any statistics that you can that demonstrate that the work of the volunteers are doing it's benefiting the community.  Do not use the same statistics over and over again.  Constantly search for new ones.  (Undoubtedly you will be reporting to a board, or some higher authority, within the volunteer charity or organization.  These statistics and metrics are useful not only for providing to your volunteer corps, but also to introduce any statement or report that you make to the board.)

The price of motivating a volunteer corps is constant vigilance, er, rather, constant research.  This is probably not the most urgent task you have, but it probably is the most important.  Carve out a chunk of time in your week.  You know the times during your week when people are least likely to be interrupting you with other demands.  Block off a section, possibly four hours per week, to do this kind of research.  Research your own statistics.  Research your own mail, and email.  Research the letters to the editor, or any kinds of mention in your local newspaper, or on the local radio station.  Research by talking to your opposite numbers in similar enterprises in other towns in your area.  Or even not in your area.  Write an article for any newsletter provided by some umbrella group of which your charity is a member, on this topic of researching ways to find indications of importance, and submit that article, asking for those in your position in other organizations to contact you with ideas about what they have found, and what they do.  (Feel free to steal liberally from this article.)  In fact, submit the article to any organization that deals with volunteers, whether or not they are related to your cause.  Motivating and managing volunteers may rely on the cause, but the statistics and motivations are independent.

The second way to reassure volunteers that their work is important, is to thank them.  Not just verbally.  We have already covered that.  Do that at every opportunity.  And in as many different varied ways as you can.  No, what I'm talking about here is the perks.  Make sure that you do things for your volunteers.  In one sense it doesn't matter how small is the thing that you do for the volunteers.  I remember an anecdote in the book "In Search of Excellence," where an engineer found a solution to a problem that had been bedeviling the company for years.  As it happened, when he made the final breakthrough, it was late in the evening, and pretty much everyone had gone home.  But his manager was still there, and the engineer reported that he had found the solution.  The manager realized that rewarding this, in however small a fashion, and in whatever weird way, was more important right now then having an enormous presentation ceremony possibly months down the line.  So he ransacked his office to find something he could give to the engineer.  The only thing he was able to find was a banana, left over from his lunch, in his desk.  He gave the engineer the banana.

It does matter what you do.  In the same way that simply repeating the phrase, "your work is important," eventually loses all meaning, continuing to give out the same recognition "attaboy" certificate, or enamel pin, or coffee mug, also loses eventually loses all meaning.  Once again, try to be creative.  On a regular basis, in the same way of finding statistics, metrics, and ways to say thank you and prove to the staff that their work is important, find and search for different things to give to your volunteers.  They don't have to be expensive.  They don't have to be valuable.  They don't even have to be particularly useful.  But they have to be ready to hand whenever somebody does something right.

And then there are the other perks.  Do you provide coffee for your volunteer staff?  This might be an open coffee pot in the office. It might be a coffee shop's gift certificate, or some such thing, that you can provide, on random occasions, to everyone who is going on a shift of volunteer work.  It can be a bowling night.  It can be a Christmas banquet.  Go to the stores in your community, and make your case for the benefits to the businesses of the work that your volunteers do in the community.  Get some gifts that you can hand out at the regular volunteer meeting, or at the summer picnic.  Make sure that your volunteers are thanked materially.  Yes, you are going to have to go, cap in hand, to the board for budgetary amounts in order to do this.  Remind them that, according to business research, whatever they pay the volunteers, it would have cost them four or five times as much to hire someone to do that work.  It's not exactly pay, but make sure that your volunteers get some material benefit.

And, of course, you will have noticed that all of this requires you to do work.  To spend time talking to other organizations, or businesses in your town, or other volunteer organizations, or volunteer umbrella organizations.  It takes time to go and speak to people.  It takes time to call them on the phone.  It takes time to send email messages, and then bug the recipients to respond.  Yes, it takes time.  And you're busy.  Nobody who works in a volunteer organization is *not* supremely busy.  It comes with the territory.  It has to be done.

And it comes back to the instruction I started out with: be honest.  With yourself.

Do you really believe in the cause of the organization?  Do you really believe that there is an important need that is not being met?  Do you really believe that this need is so important that it has to be addressed, even if it has to be addressed by the chowderheads that are under your command?

Now, of course, everyone knows the joke about the important thing being sincerity, and that, once you can fake sincerity, you've got it made.  And I've worked for people who have felt that they were smarter than all the volunteers (after all, the fact that *they* were getting paid, and the volunteers weren't, proved it), and they could just keep saying "your work is important" and nobody would ever catch on.  But remember, somebody else said that you can fool all of the people some of the time, and you can fool some of the people all of the time, but, if you rely on fooling a bunch of volunteers, eventually the only ones in the corps will be the ones too thick to do the job.

So ask yourself, and be honest: do I believe in this task?

If so, you will do this work.

If not, you are in the wrong business.  Quit.

Volunteer management - VM - 0.00 - introduction and table of contents

https://fibrecookery.blogspot.com/2025/05/volunteer-management-vm-000.html

Volunteer management - VM - 0.02 - assets

I have mentioned managing risk.  I have also mentioned that I am a security specialist, so we talk about managing risk a lot.  And there is one thing that too many people keep on forgetting when we are talking about managing risk.  People are willing to talk about threats, and impact, and vulnerabilities, and protections, but, too often, people fail to consider what is the most important aspect of all, in terms of risk analysis and management.

The asset.

All right, that may sound a little weird when we are talking about volunteer organizations.  But we do, indeed, have assets in volunteer organizations, and we need to protect them from risk.

Okay, you may be thinking about the building that you have, or rent, and the furniture that may have been donated, and maybe the photocopier, and possibly the coffee machine.  No, the first asset that you need to think about is your volunteers.

After all, if you don't have volunteers, you don't have a volunteer organization.  You need volunteers.  You need volunteers who will do work for you, in pursuit of the cause or objective.  We will talk a bit more about that, a bit later, and motivation, and a number of other things.  But, first off, remember that they are an asset.  They are a resource.  In order to pursue the objectives of your volunteer organization, you need volunteers.  You have to recruit them, you have to motivate them to work, and you have to retain them, because, as I said before, they make up only four percent of the population and a number of other volunteer organizations would be only two delighted to poach them from you.  They are an asset.  You need to protect them.

Okay, there are other assets.  There is the aforementioned building, and possibly desks, and chairs, and computers, and possibly pieces of specialized gear.  It depends on what your organization does.  Those are all assets, but they are normal assets, and you protect them in the normal way that you protect any kind of business asset.  That doesn't change in a volunteer organization, so we don't need to go into too much detail about that.

Then near there is the reputation of your organization.  This is a major asset.  This is, after all, how you are going to get donations that you may need to fulfill your tasks and objectives.  Your organization's reputation is important, and you always need to make that quite clear to your volunteers.  Pretty much all volunteer organizations are going to tell their volunteers that they represent the organization, or possibly a parent organization, and they need to be on their best behavior, and not break any of the policies or rules, because it would look bad.  But that's a pretty weak consideration for most of your volunteers.  They probably don't care too much about the parent organization, and they may not even particularly be concerned about the volunteer organization overall.  You need to make clear to the volunteers that the reason you are asking them not to break rules, and be polite to the public, and all kinds of other associated issues to do with good behavior, is that, in pursuit of the objectives that you all share, you need to have goodwill from the public, and from donors, and possibly from other businesses or entities that you are going to ask for assistance in the tasks you need to accomplish.  The objective, that you all share, is something that the volunteers are going to care about.  Note that you need public support, donations, possibly donations in kind, possibly donations of services, and that the reputation of the organization means that you can obtain those donations or services.  That's the kind of thing that is going to matter to your volunteers.  That's how you get them to protect your reputation.

That's also the kind of argument to make in terms of protecting other aspects, like the building, or the chairs, or the organization's vehicle.  Make the argument on the basis of the objective of the organization: the cause that the volunteers are there to support.  Tell them that if they leave doors unlocked, then the desk that they need to write on, in pursuit of whatever tasks you're having them doing, are going to be gone.  Tell them that if they leave the truck parked in a bad part of town, then the windows get smashed, and then the truck can't be used for whatever the truck is needed for.  Security is everybody's job, as we say in the security field, but give them a reason with which they are going to agree when you ask them to help protect your assets.

Which brings us to our final asset: your cause.  The objective behind the volunteer organization in the first place.  This is kind of an interesting one because, in a sense, your real objective is to put yourself out of work.  Because behind any kind of charitable organization is something that is not being addressed by society at Large.  It's not something that you can get someone to make a business out of because no one has figured out how to make money out of doing this, or they would have done so already and you wouldn't need a charitable organization.  So, if your organization is, in fact, effective, then it reduces the cause for the organization to exist.  You are, constantly, trying to put yourself out of business.

Okay, that may sound a bit weird.  But it's the reality, and it's just one of the ways in which volunteer management is quite distinct from ordinary business management.

Volunteer management - VM - 0.00 - introduction and table of contents

https://fibrecookery.blogspot.com/2025/05/volunteer-management-vm-000.html

The "Enhanced Games"

I've got to admit to a certain ambivalence about the "Enhanced Games."

I have no interest in any "professional" sports.  I tend to agree that it is basically forty people on the field in desperate need of a rest, being watched by forty million people on the couch in desperate need of exercise.

Since pretty much all adult sport, even the Olympics, is now "professional," I have a hard time taking *any* statements about the "purity" of sport seriously.

However, I do see the health dangers of declaring "open season" on doping and other forms of extreme training regimes.  Only a few Americans are going to make enough money off of the "Enhanced Games" to pay for their medical bills later in life, and those of us in countries with proper medical systems are going to be paying for a number of people who *thought* that they would become famous (and mostly won't).

Overall, it seems to be a very weird experiment in terms of different types of risk analysis.  (Including what *any* kind of  participation could do for or to your reputation.)

Volunteer management - VM - 0.01 - management importance

I have, for a quarter of a century now, facilitated review and preparation seminars for those who, already established and working in the field of information security, wish to challenge the examination for certification as professionals.  (This exam is probably one of the hardest that you will ever encounter.  One of the candidates in one of my seminars, towards the end of the seminar, said that, if he ever encountered a candidate for a job for which he was hiring, regardless of what the job was, who held this certification, he was going to hire that person.   He felt that the material and requirements that we had gone through during the week had been sufficient that, anybody who could pass that examination was worth hiring, for anything.)

I always start the seminars with the section on security management.  This is because a lot of the candidates who come to challenge for the exam are well familiar with, and experienced in, the information technology that is required.  Fewer of them have had management experience.  I start with the section on security management, to point out that you can have all of the security tools that you want, and have those tools working to optimal efficiency, and if you are not managing the system properly, you may have no security at all.

This same point needs to be made for any kind of management position.  You have to manage, if you are a manager.  And, basically, management means that you have to do the whole job.  It means that there are things that you may think that you know, when you are managing volunteers, because you yourself have been a volunteer for a number of years.  You understand the cause.  You understand the objective.  You understand the tasks necessary to come to accomplish the objective.  You have worked, as a volunteer, for many years, and have a great deal of experience in that frontline role.

That doesn't mean that you can manage it.

There are new requirements for you as a manager of volunteers.  You have to understand not only the cause and the objective, but you now have to see that in a new light, and understand the resources that are available to you.  Primarily these resources are the volunteers in your charge.  You only have a certain number of volunteers.  Each volunteer can only do a certain amount of work.  And, of course, the amount of work that an individual volunteer can accomplish is going to vary.  It is going to vary depending upon their own level of experience and training.  It is going to vary according to other demands on their time, and interests.  It is going to vary depending upon their commitment to this particular cause or objective.  There can be a number of other factors that modify how much work a given volunteer will be able to provide for you.  You are, even though you may not have a budget to pay salaries for your volunteers, still needing to do some kind of budgetary planning and management, in the much *more* complex analysis of how much work your resources; the volunteers; can provide for you.  You have to know what the cause is, and what the objective is, and you have to understand how to direct your resources (that is, your volunteers) to best effect the objective.

If you come from a management background, and, having managed different departments and offices, you now find yourself managing a volunteer organization, or a volunteer office within your organization, you have a different set of problems, and new skills are required.  I frequently say, in teaching security management, that any manager, of any organization, no matter what it is that they are managing, is really managing two things: personnel, and risk.  As an experienced manager in charge of an office or department, you have been used to handling issues of personnel management.  You need to get to know your workers, you need to get to know their interests, and you use that knowledge of them, as well as the fact that you or the company is paying them, in order to direct them towards the objectives required by that department or office.  But now you are managing volunteers.  Motivating volunteers is somewhat different than motivating employees, and we will go into the issues of motivation in more detail, later in this series.  The same skills and processes that you have used in managing employees, in terms of learning your employees and their interests and skills, do apply in this situation.  The thing is that they become much, *much* more important in a volunteer organization.  You no longer have the motivation of paying employees.  Your ability to manage and motivate the volunteers depends far more upon your knowledge of the volunteers, and their trusting you as a manager (which was important in a commercial enterprise) now becomes much, *much* more important, and, indeed, absolutely vital.

As a manager of a volunteer organization, or a volunteer office within a larger enterprise, you are going to require all of the skills of management for a commercial enterprise, and then some.  There are additional skills which are not called upon in a commercial enterprise.  Your ability to make a personal connection, with the people that you are managing, becomes much more crucial in a volunteer situation.  Tasks which you would normally assign to other offices within a commercial enterprise, you are now required to handle yourself.  You need to know the cause and you need to know your volunteers, very deeply.  You probably will need to know other volunteer organizations, some working for either the same, or a similar cause, and some which may not be working towards the same cause, but may be pursuing causes that are congruent with your own objective.  So you are dealing with people that you are not paying, and you are also dealing with external organizations, upon which you have no contractual or commercial leverage.  If you are used to managing within a commercial enterprise, this will require a whole new raft of skills, while still being part of management.

Introduction and table of contents

https://fibrecookery.blogspot.com/2025/05/volunteer-management-vm-000.html

Sermon 62 - Trickster

Sermon 62 - Trickster

Acts 17:22-23

Paul then stood up in the meeting of the Areopagus and said: "People of Athens! I see that in every way you are very religious.  For as I walked around and looked carefully at your objects of worship, I even found an altar with this inscription: to an unknown god.  So you are ignorant of the very thing you worship—and this is what I am going to proclaim to you."

2 Corinthians 1:4

who comforts us in all our troubles, so that we can comfort those in any trouble with the comfort we ourselves receive from God.

Romans 6:1

What shall we say, then?  Shall we go on sinning so that grace may increase?

Job 40:6,7

Then the Lord spoke to Job out of the storm:

Brace yourself like a man;

    I will question you,

    and you shall answer me.

Let us now praise famous famous gods!

Okay, that may sound a little strange, given that this is a sermon addressed to Christians, and we worship the one and only true God.  However, a number of Christian authors and philosophers have turned to the various polytheistic theologies, in order to explore the nature of the one God, and illustrate various aspects of His nature.

It doesn't tend to matter which of the various polytheistic mythologies that you choose.  They all tend to have fairly common types of gods that keep being represented, over and over again, in the various mythologies.  Archetypes.

There is, for example, the father god.  Or, sometimes, the creator god.  Or, in more generic parlance, probably the CEO god.  This is the god who is nominally in charge of the other gods.  This may be illustrative of the creative power of God, or the ultimate power of God, or, possibly, the sovereignty and lordship of God.

There are often female gods, sometimes mother, sometimes virgin, representative of love, or fertility, or productivity, or possibly order, comfort, and hearth-and-home: the stability of society.  There are possibly gods of war, or battle, or thunder, or power of various types.  There are gods of beauty, there are gods of justice, there are gods of pleasure, there are gods of all manner of good things.  There are gods of the seas, there are gods of the forest, and all other created things.  There are gods of mountains, there are gods of volcanoes.  There are the messengers of the gods, reminding us to be prepared, and ready, for messages from God.  All of the archetypes of the various polytheistic mythologies are representative of different aspects of God.  After all, even if they get a little fuzzy on the details, they are all, as Paul pointed out, sincere attempts to *find* God, so they all tell us something *about* God.

And then there is the Trickster.

Pretty much all mythologies have a trickster god.  This is an oddball god.  This is a mischievous, and possibly unreliable god.  This is a god that sometimes does good things, and sometimes does bad things.  Possibly because of the inconsistency, the trickster tends to get mentioned an awful lot in different myths and legends.  The trickster shows up in many pantheons of many mythologies.  In Norse mythology he was Loki.  In, well, not so much Greek mythology as paganism, he was Pan, embodied by J. M. Barrie in "Peter Pan."  In many of the First Nations mythologies and stories the trickster is Raven.  The trickster can be used, as a literary device, whenever you write yourself into a mythological corner, and need some way to get out of it.  And, it's an awful lot of fun to have stories about someone where you're not really sure what the heck is going to happen.  So the trickster gets used an awful lot in mythology, and the related myths.

What the heck are we to learn, about God, from the Trickster?

Some people will look at the fact that the trickster does bad things, and say that the trickster represents the devil.  However, this really isn't consistent.  The trickster sometimes does good things.  And, of course, the devil never does.  The devil is always opposed to God, and is, therefore, by definition, evil.  The devil is never going to give us anything that's any good.  The phrase "a deal with the Devil" means that even if we think we've got a good deal, there is some kind of problem with it, and it's going to turn out very badly for us.  Now, of course, we do have stories where somebody supposedly makes a good deal with the devil, and gets the advantage of the devil, but that really isn't terribly theologically correct.  That is turning the devil into a mere Trickster.  So we are fooling ourselves in that case, and it doesn't really work.

We might be able to say that the trickster represents randomness.  This represents the fact that we live in a complex, chaotic world, where bad things do happen.  In that case, the trickster just represents the chaos of the world, and the fact that sometimes bad things happen, for no particular reason, and we have to make the best of it.  Therefore, the trickster just represents chaos, and randomness.

If the trickster represents randomness, and chaos, and bad things happening to not particularly bad people for no particular reason at all, there is, probably, one lesson to take away from this.  That is, that this is *our* opportunity to help.  This is our opportunity to show our love for our neighbors.  This is the time when we can help people who are worse off, in this disaster, than we are.  Or people to whom disaster or distress has happened, even if it doesn't involve us.  This we can do, if the trickster is just random.

But that rationale of, or explanation for, the trickster doesn't really work either.  The trickster, in the mythologies, has a personality.  The trickster is not simply chaos, or a roll of the dice, or a coin flip.  The trickster is acting.  The trickster is an agent.  And besides, if we believe that God is all powerful, then we believe that God is in control of everything, even those things that are apparently random.

There is one other possibility.  The trickster may represent the fact that we simply don't know enough about what is going on.  After all, we are finite.  God is infinite.  We don't know the whole plan.  Something that may look like it is bad, could, in fact, actually be good.  It may even be good for *us*.

I have a few examples from my own life.  The first is, I never wanted to be a teacher.  The reason that I didn't want to be a teacher is that both of my parents were teachers.  Now, looking back on it, they weren't particularly good teachers.  Also, they didn't really love teaching.  I don't think they even enjoyed teaching at all.  They certainly didn't do a lot of teaching to us kids; their kids.  They looked upon teaching as a job.  My dad, one time, suggesting that I should, in fact, become a teacher, gave, as the reason for deciding on teaching for a career, the fact that you could put in your thirty years, get your pension, and then get out.  I didn't think that that was particularly great career advice.  So I didn't want to be a teacher.

And then circumstances conspired so that it seemed that probably teaching was the only career immediately available to me.  And I became a teacher.  And, pretty much right away, I realized two things.  The first was that I had been teaching, in one way and another, for years.  The second was that I absolutely loved teaching.

So, I got a job as a teacher.  (No, I am not just simply going on with the first point, this is the second example.)  And then I got fired.  Now it's never fun getting fired.  But I got fired at a time, and in such a way, that it seemed like I would never be a teacher, in the public education system, ever again.  And I had, by this time, realized that I really loved teaching.  So that seemed like a really bad situation.  But a funny thing happened.

Because I had been fired from a teaching job, I got on to the Internet, way before most people got on to the Internet, and, in fact, before it was even *called* the Internet.  Because I got fired, I had the opportunity to go and take a masters degree in information technology.  In a program that wasn't really terribly well put together, and where I had to take a bunch of weird courses  just to finish the requirements.

Because I got fired, when I did, at a time when it was difficult to get a job, I had to take all kinds of short-term contract jobs.  In business, in industry, in government, even in academia.  I didn't like this.  I'm not someone who always wanted to be an independent contractor.  I'm really happy with a nine-to-five job.

And because I got fired from teaching, and I was having a very hard time finding a job, and I was on the Internet, and I had taken a masters degree, in a field where I didn't know what you were, and weren't, supposed to take to prepare yourself for a career in that field, I got a very broad background, and I started to get interested in researching stuff in a field that I didn't yet know was called information security, and I started getting short-term contracts in that field, and eventually decided that I should take an exam to see if I could be certified as a professional in that field (mostly to see if I knew what I was talking about when I was advising people in the field), and because of the breadth of my background and a few other things, it turns out that I had close to a perfect background to become an instructor in the field.  And so, because I got fired from teaching, I was able to teach, in the best teaching gig in the world, on six continents.  (That's a way of saying "all over the world.")

Okay, if you think that two examples about teaching are too close together, I'll give you another, very personal, and rather embarrassing, one, that isn't about teaching.

I never had a girlfriend.  I never had a girlfriend growing up.  I never had a girlfriend in high school.  I never had a girlfriend in university, and I was in university for rather a long time.  I never had a girlfriend while I was teaching.  I never had a girlfriend as I was trying to make my way in my early career path.

And then I met Gloria, and I proposed to her, and married her, so quickly that we could never figure out if we actually had a date, before we got married.  So I don't even know if I had a girlfriend even then.

But, at some point, I realized that Gloria had not had the best experience with men.  And the fact that she had been abandoned, and divorced, didn't do anything for her self-confidence, for herself as a woman.  And, she let me know, at one point, the fact that I had never had a girlfriend was important to her.  It meant that she had no competition.  She was happy that I had never had a girlfriend.  So all the years that I spent alone were not simply wasted years.  That entire time, and the fact that I had never had a girlfriend, was something that I could offer to Gloria.  And it was important to her.  It was very good for her.  So what had seemed, to me, for a number of years, as being bad, was, in fact, very good.

We don't know these things.  We don't know these things in advance.  Sometimes we don't know these things until long after the fact.  It's quite possible that we may never know these things, in this life.  We don't know the whole plan.  We don't know the whole situation.  We are not God.

There is a book, and a television series, by written by Neil Gaiman and Terry Pratchett, called "Good Omens."  It is about the end of the world.  Almost.  It's a little theologically questionable in the fact that an angel and a demon are teaming up to try to prevent the end of the world.  The armies of heaven, in the persons of the Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse, are getting ready for the last battle, to destroy the world.  And the angel, trying to prevent this, is arguing with another angel, who is the leader of the armies of heaven, who is preparing to destroy the Earth.  And the angel, leading the armies of heaven, preparing to destroy the earth, is saying to the angel who is trying to prevent this, "well, this is the plan!"

"Ah!" says the lone angel, standing against this array of force and power.  "But, is it the *ineffable* plan?"

We don't know.  We make our plans, and our preparation.  We may even think that we are doing the right thing, that we are doing what God wants.  But we don't know everything.  God knows everything.  He knows what we should be doing.  He knows where the plan is going.  He knows that what looks like a terrible disaster is, in fact, just a platform from which he is going to build something even better.  We don't know what that is.

So, we don't know when something that we think is bad, is, in fact, good.  We don't know that beforehand.  When something happens, and we think it's bad, God may be preparing something good.  It might not happen right away.  I was alone for fifteen years before I met Gloria.  I thought, for twenty years, that I was finished with teaching.  And as a matter of fact, even when I had started teaching all over the world, it took me another ten years to figure out what had happened.  So what I saw as something bad, I didn't see as something good, for about thirty years.

Oh, you say, I seem to have wandered rather far from the Trickster.  No, actually, I haven't.  This is all part of the sermon plan.

(You didn't know that, did you?)

This is what the Trickster is teaching us.  We don't know everything.  We may not know everything, even after it happens.  We may never know what the plan is, and what good is necessary from what we see as bad, in this lifetime.

Right now, I am a grieving widower.  God has taken Gloria, and I am, once again, alone.  Not only that, but the depression, against which I have fought all of my life, has returned, stronger than ever, and now no longer cyclical, so that it is constant.  I am not enjoying life.  You can read that as the greatest understatement of the century, if you like.  I simply put it that way so as not to use vocabulary that nobody ever hears in church, in describing my situation.  My life is terrible.

At least, *I* think it's terrible.  I think it's bad.  But I'm trying; and it is really, really hard; to have faith.  To be humble before the fact that I do not know the whole story.  I do not know the whole plan.  I am trying to trust.  And it is quite possible that I will not know why God is having me go through this, before I die.  I am trying to trust.

And that, ultimately, is the lesson of the Trickster.  The Trickster is not the god of mischief, no matter how the various mythologies have blurred the lesson.  The Trickster is the god of humility, and faith, and trust.

God is in control.  God is all powerful.  In other sermons I have pointed out that God even uses our mistakes, for his good purposes. (I have to point out, along with Paul, that I am not saying that I should sin so that God's goodness can shine brighter.)  God is almighty, and God loves us.  God wants good things for us.  If we are suffering now, it is because God has something better for us, later on.  No matter how much later "later on" is.  (This also isn't to say that we cannot do our best to help out someone who is in distress right now.  Don't worry about messing up God's plan.  You can't.)

The Trickster isn't a representation of the devil.  The Trickster isn't just random.  The Trickster, in terms of the lesson we should learn from him, is not simply a mischievous prankster.  The Trickster is the god of humility, trust, and faith.  And that is the lesson we need to learn.

https://fibrecookery.blogspot.com/2023/09/sermons.html

Grief scams

I am a grieving widower.  However, I am also an expert in information security.  I got my start researching malware, spam, scams, and frauds.  Therefore, it follows that I know quite a bit about grief scams.

Since I know about all manner of scams, I know what *I* mean by grief scams.  But I should probably clarify the term, since there are all manner of activities which might be of concern.

Many professionals, such as psychological counselors, do charge for supporting people in the process of grief, and, indeed, the entire medical system is, in a sense, profiting from the suffering of individuals who are in difficulty.  Generally speaking, medical professionals have gone through years of training, in order to most effectively address the difficulties that people are experiencing.  A number of people have, however, decided to set up shop by selling various forms of "support" to those in grief, without having studied.  In recent research, I was startled by the number of companies that have created "griefbot" or "restoration" systems, often without any apparent study of grief or counselling at all.  I have difficulty justifying griefbot systems or amateur "counsellors" in their attempt at making money off the grief and suffering of others, in any case.  After all, I volunteer in a hospice environment, and spend many hours, not being paid, trying to support people who are going through their own process of grief.  However, I do draw a line between these enterprises and actual scams.

Grief scams are, specifically, a variation on romance scams.  However, they are a particularly vile type of fraud, in that they specifically prey on a population known to be vulnerable and susceptible.  However, grief scams are somewhat unique, in the family of fraud overall, in that the community is able, quite aside from educational materials and workshops, to ensure that the community itself is protected against the danger of grief scams.  We'll come back to that.

Romance scams and frauds have been going on, basically, forever.  The fraudster, or confidence trickster, either by research, or simply by cold reading during conversation, pretends to be first a compatible friend, and then, eventually, a potential, and generally strong, romantic interest.  In the age of the Internet, where, famously, nobody knows that you are a dog, the scammer can pick targets of pretty much any gender.  This allows for a wider range of targets, since the budding friendship, and then romance, can be conducted online via email, text, or other forms of messaging, without the necessity of meeting face to face.  If the target wants a picture of the scammer, the scammer can simply harvest anyone of a number of possible, and generally attractive looking, pictures that are available online, or, these days, simply generate one with generative artificial intelligence.

About fifteen years ago, when Twitter was new, a number of us in the information security field were contacted by young ladies who expressed interest in us and our work.  Generally speaking, these young ladies must have lived in relatively warm climates, given the lack of interest in heavy clothing.  Eventually, through research, we found out that all of these accounts were being generated from China, and were part of a dedicated and concerted effort to infiltrate the information security field in the West.  Not all of the activity, in regard to this mass campaign, was specifically in regard to romance scams.  However, by being allowed to become a "friend" of an information security expert, the account would then be accepted, as a "friend" or other "approved" contact, by other information security workers and researchers.  Thus this campaign was able to establish accounts within networks of information security experts and practitioners.

However, this is all related to the more general category of romance scams, of which there are many types.

Grief scams target the bereaved.  Those who have suffered a loss, particularly of a spouse, or a close friend or family member, are subject to grief.  Grief is not a single entity, but a syndrome: a collection of symptoms and characteristics related to our reaction to a significant loss.  One of the characteristics, and, overall, the most common in prevalence, is that of sleep disturbance.  Those who are bereaved may sleep more than normal, but most often, they suffer from a lack of sleep.  This is unfortunate as it leads to cognitive impairment, and bad decision making, just at a time when you are faced with a mass of decisions that, in our society, have to be made right away.

However, one of the other, relatively common, symptoms of grief is that of an extreme loneliness.  It is very difficult to describe, to someone who is not in mourning, how strong this feeling of loneliness is.  It isn't as if you had lost one relationship (albeit a very important one), but as if you had lost relationship, in general.  The loneliness is intense, and pervasive.  It affects your behavior, sometimes in extremely odd ways.  It has, in fact, become one of our cliches about grief and bereavement: Mum dies, and then Dad, inappropriately quickly, falls in love with some inappropriate bimbo, and gets remarried.

This is, pretty much, what grief scammers are relying upon.

Grief scammers are, of course, targeting the bereaved, and those who have suffered a loss.  They are searching social media for appropriate targets.  As just noted, they are searching for the bereaved because the bereaved are particularly susceptible to the approach that they are going to make.  The bereaved are lonely, and are, very likely, also beset by problems, and are at a point and situation in their lives where cognitive faculties may be somewhat impaired.  All of these make the bereaved targets for this particular type of scam.

So, how do grief scammers find their victims?  Well, as I have noted, on social media.  We, in the information security field, recognize social media as a major danger.  As we frequently try to point out to people, if you are concerned about your own privacy, and if you do not want people to know absolutely everything about your private life, stop posting every single detail of your private life on the public Internet.  We tend to give away far too much information about ourselves, sometimes not even realizing that we have done so.  Sometimes in the postings that we ourselves originate, and sometimes in the responses that we make to other people's postings.

Now, as I have said, it's probably not a great idea to post, on social media, that you are a grieving widower, and are desperately looking for someone to relieve your loneliness.  But this is not the only way that grief scammers can find their targets.  As a matter of fact, it is probably not the most important way that scammers will find their targets.

As we, any information security, also frequently say, if you are not paying for the service, then, in fact, *you* are the product.  Pretty much all social media platforms are freely available.  Most make no charge for using their services.  Some may have some associated charges for enhanced functions or services, but, for the most part, general chatter, and connecting with other people, on social media platforms is available to anyone who wants to create an account, at no charge.  So, how do the social media companies, such as Meta/Facebook, become some of the largest and most valuable companies in the world?  Well, it's by selling information about the people who use those social media platforms.

(Social media companies and platforms began appearing around the time when American intelligence agencies had just faced a scandal where it was revealed that they had been spying on American citizens.  There is an information security joke that says that since they were forbidden to do so, a bunch of intelligence staff met in the basement to decide what to do.  One suggested that they set up a Website, present it as a social media site, and have everyone in the world type in all their private information and deepest, darkest secrets.  The other all said he was crazy: nobody would ever do such a thing.  "Trust me," he said.  "We'll call it Facebook!  It'll work!"  And it did.)

Social media allows the companies that run the platforms to collect information about you.  They then sell that information to companies, advertisers, political parties, and, indeed, anybody who is willing to pay for the information.  And it's not just the text and content that you post on social media that provides information.  Every time you look at a posting, every time you "like" a posting, every time you share a posting with your friends, every time you acknowledge someone as a friend or a family member, every entry you make on your profile, identifying your hometown, or the town where you currently reside, or the company that you work for, or the school that you went to, all of these items are information that can be gathered about you, and packaged, and sold.  In fact, the information about postings that you look at, or share, or like, is far more valuable to advertisers, and political propagandists, then is anything that you write and post on social media.  And, it is also far easier to collect.  Reading your postings, and understanding what it says about you requires a person to spend time reading it, and thinking about it.  Collecting information about what you like, or what you share, or who your friends are, takes a fraction of a second and can be done by a program.  So, if a grief scammer is looking for targets, then it would take quite a long time reading through different people's postings to find the one where I say that I am a grieving widower.  However, a program can, in a flash, determine the fact that I "follow" at least a dozen grief accounts (accounts created by people who are providing grief support to the bereaved), and can then know, with pretty good certainty, that I am one of the bereaved.  So, it's pretty quick and easy for scammers to determine who the grief scam targets are.

(Grief scam targets are not solely identified through social media.  There are some scammers who still do it the old-fashioned way: by reading the obituaries, and noting surviving family members.  But social media allows you to do it much faster, and at scale.)

As I have, previously, noted, I have been the target of romance scams in the past and have been able to identify such approaches on Twitter, WhatsApp, and a variety of other platforms.  Recently I was subject to a few grief scam approaches on the Facebook platform.  It is fairly easy to identify these approaches.  For one thing, two of the accounts supposedly originate from the same small town, which seems rather unlikely on the face of it.  In the second place, the profile pictures of the supposed women identified by these accounts are somewhat older than the romance scam illustrations have been in the past.  The approach was also somewhat unusual: in both cases the initial messages to me were not through the private messaging function on the Facebook system, but rather replies to postings that I had made, or replies to comments that I had made to other postings.  When I sent a reply to one of these approaches, asking why this "person" was so interested in my postings and writing (both of the approaches had stated this), the reply said that I posted such "cool and interesting" material.  It is always gratifying to hear this type of thing, and pretty much everyone anyone who was not already a professional paranoid would probably accept it.  But, you will note, it isn't very specific.  And, indeed, the posting went on to say that I post such "heartwarming" stories about my family, and I seem like such a "happy person who is a joy to be around."

This, of course, is full of red flags.  In the first place, I do not post heartwarming stories about my family.  As a matter of fact, I don't post *any* stories about my family.  (I'm a security expert.  I respect the privacy of others, particularly those closest to me.)  And, as I frequently note to people, not only am I a grieving widower, but I am also a depressive.  I'm not a happy person who is a joy to be around.  I certainly don't write and post material exclusively in that vein.  I may write comic stories about events that happened to me, and I try to make unfortunate events that happen to me sound as funny as I can when I'm writing about them, but there couldn't possibly be sufficient of that material to make people feel that I am a happy person who is a joy to be around.  For one thing, I am frequently posting about information security, and the dangers of technology, social media, artificial intelligence, cryptocurrency, and all kinds of other dangers to individuals and, indeed, our society.  No, I am not a jolly, happy person who is a joy to be around, and anybody who can make that kind of statement obviously hasn't read the content of my postings.

What they probably *should* have read, is a report that says that I follow an awful lot of comedy accounts.  I suppose it would be an easy enough mistake to make.

In a very short space of time I have had multiple romance/grief scams contacts on Fakebook--all of them (within the first few messages) telling me "I can't send you friend request," and either instructing or implying that I should attempt to "friend" them, or contact them via private messaging.

Interestingly, in one case, despite the fact that my email address was available, the scammer did *not*, in fact, contact me via email.

Facebook/Meta is lousy at protecting its users from such scams.  But I assume that, somewhere in the bowels of the "algorithm," there is some awareness of the types of messages that scammers send their "friends," and thus the scammers have learned to avoid "friending" too many marks at a time.  I also assume that these attempts are part of an organized scam "farm" operation, given the frequency and consistency of the attempts on Facebook, and the avoidance of email.

So, how does the grief scam proceed?

Having selected a target, the grief scammer will find out any information that they can about the target.  Likes, dislikes, political leanings, interests, preferences of all sorts.  The scammer will then create a persona, or use a persona that is already established, but, generally, doesn't have any postings or personal information.  (This was one of the indications raising a red flag on the Facebook grief scammers whom I have just described.  The accounts had been active for a little over half a year, but no postings had been made.)

The scammer will then contact the target.  Sometimes personally, sometimes in some kind of group chat situation.  The initial approach will indicate some level of mild interest, but probably not too much.  Both grief and romance scams tend to be reasonably long-term arrangements.  Sometimes they will operate over a period of months, sometimes this may extend over years.

Initially, as I say, there will be a mild level of interest and engagement.  This allows the scammer to collect additional information about the target, as well as providing time for the target to get used to the scammers presence, so as to make the eventual approach more believable, and less suspicious.  The initial period, extending over some months, allows the scammer to present themselves as a continued and consistent presence, and not someone to be wary of.

As I say, there will be initial research, and additional research conducted during the initial engagement.  This allows for the collection of information about likes, preferences, political and religious leanings, and possibly other information that the scammer can use to reference during the subsequent romancing phase.  Information about where the target lives, the target's family, additional contacts that the target has, professional and educational level are all valuable for the subsequent romancing, and then fleecing, phases of the scam.

I should also note that frauds and scams, in this day and age (and particularly online scams), are generally highly organized.  There are still individuals pursuing individual scams.  These, of course, have been the way that confidence tricksters have been presented in literature and movies.  However, in the online world, the majority of scams and frauds that you may encounter probably have some form of organized crime behind them.  Spammers are organized, social engineers are organized, fraudsters are organized, into different specialty groups.  They are not necessarily involved in different types of online fraud, although that may be possible.  Very often the organized groups will specialize in a particular type of fraud, and will have well established processes to perpetrate the frauds.  Therefore, there may be one group of specialists who are identifying targets for grief scams, who then pass the identities of the targets on to other groups, who may have well established and multiple personae in social media platforms, and who may conduct the initial phases of the engagement.  In certain situations, while the target may feel that they are dealing with a single individual, they may be identified by one team, their identity passed to another for the initial engagement, their identity, and the associated information that has been collected, passed to an additional team for the romancing phase, and then the identity passed to a different specialist team for the fleecing phase of the scam.  (This also aids the scammers in providing the time and patience for conducting grief and romance scams, since the teams will be working with multiple targets over the same period of time.)  It can become even more complicated, in the case of, for example, a "pig butchering" scam, where larger sums of money, and scams, are involved in supposedly cryptocurrency investment scams.  (We'll address that in a bit.)

But that is a possible side issue.  At this point we are still talking about moving from the initial phase into the romancing phase.  The initial phase will probably have identified interests and social and political preferences, and the scammer, and the false persona that the scammer is presenting, will be presented to the target as someone with similar interests and sympathetic to the targets preferences and leanings.  At some point the discussion, which has been carried on at a mild level, will move to a more persistent approach, and the scammer persona will express a romantic interest in the target, and work towards a romance type of relationship.

There will be common indications of the scam that will likely be present.  There will be reasons why the target cannot meet the scammer persona.  This may be separation by distance, and if the target has sufficient money to travel to the scammers location, the scammer will probably indicate business activities that require them to move frequently, and a lack of available time in which to set up a meeting.  It may be possible that scammers will agree to meet, briefly, and use well-trained actors to meet with the target, but this is obviously more expensive, and presents additional difficulties in coaching the actors, so this is unlikely unless with high value targets.  The scammer will, obviously, avoid any close connections, or identification with locations, businesses, or people that the target may actually know.  Sometimes arrangements may be made to meet, and then canceled at the last minute, and there are generally spurious reasons provided for that.

Eventually, of course, there will be some kind of requirement for the target to provide money to the scammer.  This may be for the purposes of a business deal, or some temporary cash flow embarrassment that the scammer presents, or some sudden illness, injury, or legal entanglement, on the part of the scammer, that the target may be asked to pay for.  (The scammer will, of course, promise to pay the target back, possibly with interest, or an extra gift.)  This request isn't going to be presented until the scammer has established a strong relationship with the target.  However, it is frequently the case that small requests may be made of the target, often not involving large sums of money, which, psychologically, support the targets willingness to provide the scammer with a larger sum of money.  If the scammer can convince the target to forward some of money in the hundreds or low thousands of dollars, then subsequent requests may be made for tens (or hundreds) of thousands.  This is a pattern that is frequently seen in advance fee frauds (also known as 419, lottery, or Nigerian scams), as well.

I have mentioned "pig butchering."  This, rather unlovely, phrase describes a new form of fraud, which is basically just a combination of multiple old forms of fraud.

Pig butchering combines romance scams with investment scams, with the additional twist of the new cryptocurrency technology.  A target that has been groomed through a romance or grief scam is not asked for money for a medical emergency or legal problem, but is encouraged to invest in a new, and supposedly both safe and lucrative, investment scheme.  The scammer will state that he or she makes an income from a cryptocurrency investment scheme.  This is, theoretically, and indeed actually, possibly a legitimate investment.  Cryptocurrency, and the associated decentralized finance, allows for a great many forms of financial activity. These kinds of financial activities can, again theoretically, provide for many business opportunities that would otherwise be difficult in a standard banking situation with its associated fees.  Cryptocurrencies are not as restricted by the same types of banking fees as ordinary financial instruments.  They are also conducted by computer, and computer communications, and therefore can take advantage of rapid transactions, quickly changing financial circumstances, and many and frequent transactions conducted at high speed allowing for the rapid accumulation of tiny amounts of profit.  The idea is that these many, and only marginally profitable, transactions can, in the right circumstances, provide a livable income.

The thing is, the banking fees are there to cover the fact that there are regulations, restrictions, and limitations, on existing financial instruments.  The *regulations* are there to provide some security that the transactions, and the financial instruments, are legitimate.  Cryptocurrencies, while not all of them are actual fraud, have relatively few guarantees of value, and, with the rapid dissolution of existing restrictions and enforcement in the United States in recent times, are becoming even more dangerous in terms of investment.

Many of the new financial instruments that are based on cryptocurrency technologies, and decentralized finance, rely on a concept known as smart contracts.  Smart contracts ensure that certain conditions are met before a transaction is completed.  Unfortunately, in order to ensure that you understand the risks and guarantees of the smart contracts, you have to understand the technology at a very detailed level.  Very few people who are involved in cryptocurrency transactions actually understand the details of the technology that is at play.  Where the scam comes in in this particular case is that, after the scammer has convinced me to invest in the situation, someone who is setting up my account will have installed, in my account, a smart contract which, either after a given amount of time, or at some particular date in the future, reverts all of the income that I have made, and indeed my original investment as well, to somebody else.  Because so many smart contracts, and so many transactions, are involved in establishing these types of investments, it is extremely unlikely that I will have examined, and understood, all of them.  When my money suddenly disappears, the cryptocurrency exchange cannot be held legally at fault, because I am deemed to have agreed to the way my account was set up, and to all the smart contracts that were associated with it, and with every transaction that I was involved with.  The original scammer, who got me into the investment scheme, and the person who set up my account with the rogue smart contracts, of course disappears.  With my money.

While pig butchering may seem to be a minor variation, it has seen an explosion of growth in the past few years.  Therefore I include its details in order to alert people to look for these specifics, of investments in cryptocurrency schemes, as yet another set of indicators of fraud.

I mentioned, earlier, that grief scams are the one type of fraud where the community can protect both itself, and the individual members of the community, from this type of scam.

Grief scams are perpetrated on the grieving, mourning, and bereaved because they are vulnerable and susceptible.  The loneliness leads to a kind of desperation which makes people less inclined to examine closely offers of friendship and or romance.  The type of protection that *I* offer, that of education and awareness of the scams, is one way to protect against pretty much any scams.  However, even warnings of possible scams, plus querying of your friends and relatives who may be entering into questionable relationships, will likely elicit negative pushback.  If you ask the bereaved person how much they knew know about this new acquaintance, friendship, or romance, the answer will probably be a very stiff "enough."  The strength of the loneliness, as I have mentioned before, leads to a level of desperation which is going to make people very resistant to probing or challenge, even if it is intended to protect them.

The answer to protecting against the grief scam lies in another direction.  I may have mentioned that I was involved in a pilot project with the Vancouver area health region, examining and trying to address the issue of loneliness and isolation in seniors.  The answer to the grief scam, as well as a number of other issues, both social and medical, is to ensure that people who are isolated are *not* lonely.  To bring them, sometimes even to force them, out of isolation and into community.  You need to take care of your friends and possibly relatives, who are bereaved and lonely.  Ensure that they are not lonely.  Ensure that they are not isolated.  Check up on them.  Make sure that you understand their state of mind, and their state of isolation, community, and companionship.  Make sure that those in your community are not isolated, and therefore are not subject to grief scams.

Grief topics: https://fibrecookery.blogspot.com/2025/06/grief-table-of-contents-and-resources.html