Mysteries Explained: Reporting Your Hours
Let’s talk about volunteering and the number of hours you and your fellow members of our Alamo Area Master Naturalist (AAMN) chapter spend each year helping others in the great outdoors.
In 2007, as part of the reporting process for our annual documentation for our state office, we reported over 7,600 hours of volunteer time and almost 2,000 hours of advanced training that the AAMN members turned in to our documenting volunteers. However, many more hours were performed by our members, but were not reported. Some 2007 hours were reported as late as the end of January 2008, but we had a deadline of mid-January to submit our 2007 annual report, so those late reported hours could not be included in our totals.
In order to meet the annual deadline of early January, your board has voted to include in our 2008 totals only those hours of volunteer time and advanced training performed and reported by the end of November of this year. If you are near in meeting the requirements for a pin and make it over the line before the end of the year, the Texas Sage Pin will still be awarded.
Many Master Naturalist chapters around the state have adopted this end-of-November cut-off date for reporting hours in order to facilitate the completion of the annual report. You will be hearing more about our revised deadline as we approach the end of this year, but please stay current when reporting your hours.
Wilt Shaw and Ling Liu are posting your hours when you submit them, and we have been asking that you submit your hours to them at least quarterly to prevent a year-end overload of reported hours.
As we now have half of 2008 behind us, it is time to send your hours to Ling and Wilt so that they can stay current in their postings. Wilt and Ling have told us that they have received many reports thus far–some from first-time reporters–and for that we are very appreciative. The information we send to our state office gives the office an indication of the activity level in our chapter; if we are out there volunteering but not reporting those hours, it reflects negatively on our AAMN chapter. So, please help us out and report your hours in a timely fashion.
On another topic, summertime has come in with a vengeance! Temperatures have set records for individual days, and the lack of rain has set records for all recorded history for the period of September through May.
So please take precautions when volunteering in the summer sun. Drink lots of liquids, use sunscreen, and don’t overdo any physical activity without taking a break to cool down if the heat is above average. We value our members and the wonderful volunteerism they are so faithfully dedicated to!
