“Our volunteers are everything.”
“We couldn’t do what we do without our volunteers.”
Spend enough time around any local nonprofit and you will inevitably hear one version or another of that sentiment. Leaders say it with deep gratitude. Boards repeat it with pride. If volunteers are that great, what could possibly go wrong?
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The Legal Mechanism Already Exists: It’s Just Calibrated for a Different Threat
To understand the hidden vulnerability, look at how the law actually treats unpaid labor. The rules are much stricter than most nonprofit leaders assume.
Legally, an unpaid intern at a nonprofit is not a separate category from a volunteer. They sit in the exact same bucket. Under the Fair Labor Standards Act, both are governed by the same basic test, laid out plainly in the Department of Labor’s Fact Sheet #14A. The work has to be freely given, without expectation of pay, and it cannot be the same work that would otherwise be done by a paid employee. The law does not carve out a special exception for volunteers who happen to run something important. It applies to anyone doing the organization’s real work for free.
And this is not theoretical. In Tony and Susan Alamo Foundation v. Secretary of Labor (1985), the U.S. Supreme Court sided with the Department of Labor against a nonprofit. The Court ruled that workers the organization called “volunteers” were, as a matter of law, employees entitled to wages. The mechanism has teeth. The Court used them.
It still happens. And not just to fringe groups.
In Jacksonville Beach, Florida, a Department of Labor investigation found that the city’s century-old Volunteer Life Saving Corps had blurred into something else entirely. The corps was beloved, deeply traditional, and entirely well-intentioned. Yet the same lifeguards the city paid during the week were “volunteering” to do the identical job on Sundays and holidays. The Department of Labor found 133 separate violations. The city paid $250,000 in back wages. After 110 years, the volunteer lifeguard program just vanished.
That is the mechanism working exactly as designed. It is also a preview of how disruptive it is when reality hits. Nobody wants to be the city that loses its lifeguard corps, or the local nonprofit that loses its board chair, in a labor dispute.
But look at what it actually takes to trigger enforcement. It requires years of investigation, a formal complaint, and a fact pattern so clean that there was no ambiguity left to argue. The same people did the same job, just unpaid on different days.
Most nonprofits’ reliance on a long-tenured volunteer does not look anything like that. It is fuzzier, slower-moving, and entirely sympathetic on its face. Nobody is bringing a 133-violation case against the local arts nonprofit whose volunteer board chair has quietly run the entire fundraising operation for fifteen years. The law was built to catch displacement that looks like Jacksonville Beach’s. It was not built to catch the quiet, well-intentioned structural fragility that is actually most common.
So when a nonprofit leader tells you “no laws are being broken,” they are right in the narrowest sense. But that is the wrong test. The legal mechanism exists. It is just pointed at a different kind of abuse than the one most organizations are living with. Leaders mistake compliance for sustainability because everyone involved is acting out of goodwill. They forget that dedication doesn’t change the nature of the labor.
And there it is: work.
The tendency to rely on volunteers might feel like a strength. I would counter that it is a massive structural risk. When an organization treats a volunteer role as a permanent line item rather than a rotating community contribution, it treats a variable resource as a fixed asset. That is a fundamental operational error, and it is one the research backs up
What the Research Actually Shows
The nonprofit sector has surprisingly thin academic literature on volunteer management given how central volunteers are to the work. What exists points directly at this risk.
A widely cited study by Linda Hartenian, published in Nonprofit Management and Leadership in 2007 — “Nonprofit Agency Dependence on Direct Service and Indirect Support Volunteers” — examined how nonprofits manage two distinct categories of volunteers. She looked at those in direct-service roles, like point-of-contact work such as ushering or tutoring. Then she looked at those in indirect support roles, including fundraising, accounting, and strategy. This is the behind-the-scenes work.
Hartenian found something that should make any nonprofit leader sit up. Organizations using direct-service volunteers were, contrary to her own expectations, less likely to use sophisticated recruitment and screening. On the flip side, organizations relying on indirect-support volunteers used recruitment specifically to screen people out. They moved quickly to terminate anyone who showed signs of unreliability.
In other words, nonprofits already sense that the behind-the-scenes roles carry more risk. They screen harder going in.
What the research does not show, and what this piece is arguing, is that this initial screening rarely translates into ongoing infrastructure. It rarely leads to succession planning, documentation, term limits, or a real pipeline behind the person currently holding the role. The risk is not that nonprofits fail to notice indirect-support roles matter. The risk is that noticing is not the same as building the structure to survive losing the person in them.
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The ArtsQuest Contrast
Consider the scale at which this can work when an organization treats volunteer infrastructure as seriously as it treats paid staffing.
Take ArtsQuest in Bethlehem, Pennsylvania. They produce Musikfest, the largest non-gated free music festival in the country, along with thousands of other events and programs year-round. ArtsQuest now runs on a volunteer base of roughly 2,000 people. In 2017 alone, ArtsQuest volunteers logged nearly 39,000 hours. That work was valued at approximately $927,000 using the Independent Sector’s standard wage-replacement methodology.
That is not a number you build on goodwill alone. That is a number you build with a dedicated volunteer department, a formal application and onboarding portal, tiered recognition programs, and a standing Volunteer Committee that exists specifically to surface feedback and improve procedures year over year. ArtsQuest treats its volunteer program the way a well-run organization treats any other critical function: with infrastructure, redundancy, and continuous recruitment.
Now shrink that model down. What happens when an organization tries to replicate ArtsQuest’s reliance on volunteers without replicating its infrastructure? What happens when “1,200 volunteers with a dedicated program manager” becomes “three people who have quietly run this for a decade and nobody else really knows how”?
That is where volunteer churn stops being a staffing question and becomes a ticking time bomb.
The Concentration Risk Nobody’s Pricing In
When a paid staff member leaves, there is a standard operational playbook. You post the job, review resumes, and hire a replacement. That person is contractually obligated to show up. But when a “super-volunteer” who has run a core operational function for a decade decides they are done, the playbook vanishes. The organization does not just lose an individual. It loses an entire department.
This creates an acute operational concentration risk. Nonprofit risk-management literature generally discusses this in the context of paid staff turnover and institutional knowledge loss. It rarely extends the concept to volunteers, even though volunteers are structurally more exposed to exactly this failure mode. There is no contract, no notice period, and no succession obligation. As established above, there is no reliable infrastructure standing behind the role even when the initial screening was rigorous.
Long-time volunteers rarely document their processes. They hold the recipes in their heads. When they step away, they take years of institutional memory, unwritten donor histories, and system workarounds with them. The cost to replace that labor suddenly falls on a budget that was never built to sustain it.
Worse, these deeply dedicated individuals can accidentally choke out a healthy volunteer pipeline. Because they have it handled, the organization stops recruiting and training new people.
What Healthy Infrastructure Actually Looks Like
The Volunteer Center of the Lehigh Valley has spent nearly four decades as a regional capacity-builder, helping nonprofits professionalize exactly this function. And ArtsQuest’s own Volunteer Committee, the body that gives feedback and shapes procedure for that 2,000-person volunteer program, has its own internal shorthand for the job. One committee member recently described her goals on the committee in terms of the “3 R’s: recruitment, retention and recognition of our great volunteers.”
That is a useful diagnostic, regardless of which organization coined it.
Ask any nonprofit leader how their organization’s most critical volunteer role is currently being recruited for, retained, and recognized. Do not ask whether it is appreciated. Ask whether it has an actual pipeline, a succession plan, and a structured reason for someone new to step in. If the honest answer is “it isn’t, because Carol has it handled,” you have found your risk.
Without that structure, newer volunteers who try to step in often feel like outsiders. They find a closed loop and they leave. This accelerates churn at the bottom while leaving the top fragile.
There is a cultural cost as well. What does it say to the rest of the organization when the same small circle of names is tied to every new initiative and program?
It signals institutional stagnation. It creates an innovation ceiling. It recycles the same perspectives and biases through the lens of how we have always done things.
For the paid professionals hired to run the organization, this bottleneck is incredibly frustrating. It signals that leadership values the control of a few unaccountable insiders over professional expertise. Staff stop taking initiative because they know a legacy volunteer will ultimately dictate the direction.
When you see the same names everywhere, you are not looking at an engaged community. You are looking at an oligarchy of the willing.
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The Governance Blind Spot
This is the ultimate leadership blindspot. Executive directors and board members are highly trained to monitor financial compliance, but they routinely ignore operational dependency. If critical infrastructure lives in the head of an uncompensated individual, that is not a strategic asset. It is an off-balance-sheet liability.
Tolerating a structure where mission-critical functions depend on free labor is a failure of governance. It masks a lack of real revenue density. It prevents the organization from professionalizing its operations.
True stewardship requires a clear framework for capacity building. ArtsQuest’s model, both its program infrastructure and its own committee’s “3 R’s,” points to what that actually looks like in practice:
Paid staff own the rails. Professionals control the infrastructure, data, strategy, and continuity. These are the things that cannot disappear when one person walks away.
Volunteers power the trains. The community provides scale, connection, energy, and specialized, short-term advisory input. These are the things that should rotate.
Recruitment, retention, and recognition are active processes, not afterthoughts. If your organization cannot answer how a critical volunteer role gets refilled, you do not have a program. You have a dependency.
If the rails disappear the moment a volunteer walks away, you haven’t built an organization. You have built a club.
💬 Let’s talk about it. Who’s the “Carol” at your organization — the person who’s quietly running something critical with no real succession plan behind them? You don’t have to name names in the comments. Just tell me: does your organization actually know what happens the day they walk away?
Drop a comment below. I read every one.
Related Reading from Backstory & Strategy
→ Your Board Isn’t Underperforming. It Was Built Wrong. — The companion piece to this one. If volunteers are the operational blind spot, boards are the governance blind spot. Same root problem: organizations recruiting for goodwill instead of building for capacity.
→ The Sustainability Maturity Curve for Mission-Driven Media — The four-stage diagnostic for figuring out whether your organization is actually stable or just running on momentum and the willingness of a few key people. Read this one next if “oligarchy of the willing” sounded a little too familiar.