So the whole purpose of this post is to provide me with an opportunity to vent. If you are not in a mood to to listen to a friend vent, than I would humbly suggest you skip forward to the next, more uplifting post.

Working for a volunteer Board of Directors is ... how to say ... extremely taxing. I logged on to my email this morning to find a conversation in mid-stream. Apparently, without first discussing it with the Board, one of my Board members has taken it upon herself to invite a fundraising consultant who has been "very successful" to speak to us about fundraising for 45 minutes. Apparently, she thinks he has some things to say. This leads to a discussion about hiring on a part-time fundraising director who could oversee donor relations, public relations, etc...

My issue here is this. In two-and-half years of service, I have created a brand new fundraising effort that has brought into $25K in '06 alone. So that's $25K that did not exist two years ago. Two of the three major fundraisers beat their budgeted goal by $10K a piece. So by all objective measurements, this has been a successful year.

But the BoD wants more; and they want it from a staff that is desperately underpaid and desperately overworked. In fact, we are so poor as an organization that we do not even offer benefits to any staff. No medical, no life, no retirement, no nothing. Just a subpar paycheck and a thanks-for-working-hard-but-could-you-try-a-little-harder-next-time. And now, from a razor-thin budget, we want to bring on a new staff member, pay them poorly and have them raise all kinds of new money?!

This makes absolutely no sense. But because the Board is volunteer, we have no recourse. There is no formal evaluations of the Board. There is no nothing. So they come in for a few years, scream: "try harder" and then walk away feeling good about themselves.

I'm going nuts.