By Sometimes I think that the Mondays that follow productive weekends are harder than the ones that follow lazy weekends. We’re heading into the time of year when I have little time for lazy. There are obligations and volunteer duties, family time and other crazy stuff.
I have volunteered with San Francisco Pride for better than ten years, working in the Donations Partners department. Essentially, we are the people who greet festival goers with big pink pickle buckets asking for donations to help support the parade and festival. This year I have stepped up to manage the Donations Partners. It’s a huge task, and a lot of responsibility, but I confess that I love the challenge.
You may wonder where that donation money goes. And who are all of those people with the buckets anyway?
We partner with community organizations, non-profit groups that work with the LGBT community in some way. They come from all sections of the spectrum, from groups that work with the homeless, to social organizations, from youth groups to cheerleaders, from churches to other religious groups, from local community centers to drag queens and their courts. Each of these organizations provides volunteers to do the bucket thing.
It’s a long day of work, but each hour that a volunteer works earns money for their organization. At the end of the festival, the donations money is tallied up, and some of it goes back to the Pride organization to help pay the bills. The rest is divided up into an hourly rate, and each of the partner organizations gets a grant based on the number of hours their volunteers put in.
Unfortunately, the work puts a bit of a quash on my writing. Which was my long winded way of saying that I didn’t get much writing done this weekend. But I did get to take my 68 year old mother to a tattoo shop for the first time in her life. We took my niece to get her ears pierced. It was an experience, I’ll say.
But no writing. I guess I’ll have to try harder through the week. I need to finish my short story so I can start editing for the anthology, and then I can get back to the world of Shades and Shadows.
Natalie J Case 