Being a highly motivated, reliable, and intelligent volunteer seems pretty underestimated as potential impact. With taking a salary position, your impact is something close to your superiority to the other person who might have your position. It’s easy to imagine competent employees having a negative counterfactual impact due to displacing someone better.
On the other hand, if you are a reliable, motivated, intelligent volunteer, you are simply providing excellent resources. Volunteering for promising projects that fall in the funding cracks could be quite EV for those without financial means to help important projects.
But I would not recommend such volunteering unless you are serious… It’s very easy to have negative value to an organization as a volunteer if you take from the time and resources from an organization and leaving shortly after, or stick around without actually doing much to help.
Being a highly motivated, reliable, and intelligent volunteer seems pretty underestimated as potential impact. With taking a salary position, your impact is something close to your superiority to the other person who might have your position. It’s easy to imagine competent employees having a negative counterfactual impact due to displacing someone better.
On the other hand, if you are a reliable, motivated, intelligent volunteer, you are simply providing excellent resources. Volunteering for promising projects that fall in the funding cracks could be quite EV for those without financial means to help important projects.
But I would not recommend such volunteering unless you are serious… It’s very easy to have negative value to an organization as a volunteer if you take from the time and resources from an organization and leaving shortly after, or stick around without actually doing much to help.