Volunteers make America a better place. It may be in a museum, with the Scouts, Little League or the thousands who are volunteer EMT’s like I am.
That has value but you wouldn’t know it. Current IRS regulations don’t allow you to deduct your time as a volunteer and you can deduct a measly 14 cents a mile when the deduction for business use of your car is 48.5 cents a mile.
Financial accounting standards for not for profits allow them to record the value of your time as income only if you have a specific skill and they would have had to hire someone if you did not volunteer. As an EMT, that would allow my Corps to recognize my time as a donation, income, but not the woman who is our secretary or the non-EMT driver in the ambulance. The skill, you see.
In other words, a doctor doing painting for a pre-school has no value on the books while a doctor volunteering time at a free clinic does.
I put in, if I do just my required time for duty, meetings and classes, 319 hours a year. That has a value to society, to the Village of East Rochester. It’s an unrecognized value for the most part.
A group called Independent Sector does research into the value of volunteer time. They boil it down by state, and their figures include all sorts of volunteers. In 2006 the nationwide value of an hour by a volunteer was $18.77. Their state numbers dated from 2005, and New York’s average hourly rate for a volunteer was $23.60.
Just my little bit for the Ambulance Corps breaks out to a value of between $5,989 and $7,528. That’s not chump change to me, being between opportunities and all.
Now, they do refer readers to the Bureau of Labor Statistics where our fine government employees track wages by occupation. For May 2006, we discover the following for EMT’s in Rochester New York.
- Mean hourly wage [average of all reported]: $13.57
- Mean annual wage [average of all reported]: $28,220.
- Median hourly wage [half of the wages reported are higher and half lower]: $13.34
The Civil Service rate for a Basic EMT in Monroe County is $12.02 an hour.
OK, so that values my time for the Rochester mean at $4,329 and at the Civil Service rate at $3,834.
We have about 25 members running duty. My hours for the year ought to be about average, though I know that several members easily volunteered over 1,000 hours in the last twelve months. Slapping all the data together shows that the minimum value to the Village for our volunteer labor with the ambulance corps for the last twelve months was $95,860 and the max would have been about $188,210.
Were I able to track each member’s hours, I could obviously come up with a better estimate. But… one of the great things about volunteers is that they don’t track their hours all the time. Our hours are a gift to society, to the Village or to whatever organization benefits from our work.
We’re talking hourly rate here, too. Accounting professionals like myself recognize that you should also include benefits when looking at the cost of an employee. Just statutory benefits alone add 10% to the cost and if benefits like health insurance and other insurances are included the percentage can grow to 25% and more.
The Civil Service rate of $12.02 works out to $25,000 yearly. With benefits, one full-time EMT costs between $27,502 and $31,252 yearly. The ambulance must be staffed by at least one Basic level EMT and a driver. Normally there are two EMT’s in a crew. You need three crews per day if you run an 8 hour shift and we’ll ignore weekends and vacations for now. Your yearly cost to cover five days a week for the entire 24 hours will run between $165,011 and $187,512. To add crewmembers for vacation and weekend coverage will increase those totals.
The Village pays about $8,800 for insurances for the Corps, primarily workers’ comp. That is the only cost to the Village of East Rochester for our personnel. In return it receives well over $95,000 in cost-free volunteer labor.
I think it’s fair to say that volunteers are irreplaceable. Or, to phrase it a little differently, you can’t afford to pay for what volunteers do for free.
