Unless you're the rare social entrepreneur who receives substantial financial backing out of the gate, it's unrealistic to expect that you'll be able to pay staff early on.  It wasn't until October of 2007, four years into FORGE's existence, that we took our first paid employee – Development Director Annelisa Pedersen, who worked for two years as an unpaid volunteer.  And it wasn't until March of 2008 that I began taking a small salary.  Nick has yet to receive any financial compensation.  Operating for 4 years with no paid staff meant not only that we had to take on debt to support ourselves, but more importantly that we had to learn to manage a large corps of volunteer labor.

FORGE was bootstrapped by volunteers.  For the first four years, we provided an opportunity that most American college students never thought possible: to work on the ground in an African refugee camp.  In return for facilitating this opportunity to do meaningful and sustainable work, FORGE set and maintained strict standards and expectations.  All volunteers were required to train intensively for 7 months before departing and were required to fundraise at least $5000 for their own expenses and their project expenses.

I realized early on that if FORGE was going to rely on volunteers to such important and responsibility-laden work, a strong incentive structure had to be put in place.  Thus, FORGE's volunteer staffing structure was carefully designed in a way that aligned the interests of FORGE, the volunteers, and refugee community itself.  In this way, we were able to build a strong semblance of accountability into a labor segment (volunteers) that are notoriously tough to make accountable.

It was through such volunteer labor that FORGE built its foundation.  Over 125 volunteer Project Facilitators and Project Managers drove the planning, funding, and implementation behind over 60 individual community development projects.  Our refugee staff manages these projects, but the projects would simply not exist were it not for a large volunteer work base.

While volunteers were invaluable to our growth, I think it is important to recognize that volunteer labor can come with significant shortcomings.  Unpaid staff are inherently less accountable.  They can only volunteer for such a role because their situation allows it (they work another job or they're students).  In FORGE, few volunteers had significant international development experience when they started.  Because of this, a large amount of guidance, direction, and management was necessary to ensure that our volunteers were intellectually and philosophically prepared, that they behaved responsibly, and that they developed and implemented projects in a manner that aligned with FORGE's philosophies and goals.  This kind of international volunteer model also required a large amount of time spent on logistics: arranging plane tickets, accommodation, transportation, managing health and safety concerns, etc.  This stretched thin our already-small managing staff and decreased the time that we could spend fundraising or promoting our work.

In late 2007, after four year-long cycles of recruiting, training, and managing large teams of Western volunteers, FORGE chose to end the college-student staffing model and move to our current, Collaborative Project Planning Model.  This new model allows our managers to focus on organizational development and to raise the funds necessary to grow.  It would not have been possible, however, without the results built by a tireless volunteer staff.

If you are building an organization that relies on volunteers for any of its essential functions, I highly recommend that you take the time to do so very carefully.  In the early stages of an organization, there are often a good number of people who are interested in being a part of building something new.  These people can be extremely important to the success of the endeavor, but we have seen all too many times how contradicting ideas about the direction of the organization and people's roles within it can start to get in the way of the organization's work and mission.  Before building a volunteer team, I urge you to think long and hard about the incentives and personal motives of each person involved, and how each of these can be effectively aligned with the organization's mission in an accountable manner.