I have been trying to use volunteering as a way to meet new people and do something constructive at the same time. The number of frustrating experiences I have had as a volunteer at different organizations is just overwhelming

I've run into

• people who don't return calls or answer emails,

• professional consulting reports being discarded for political reasons,
• organizers who schedule a group work day and show up three hours late... and want to break for lunch,
• organizations that schedule 2x as many volunteers as are needed on a regular basis,
• paid staff fooling around in front of groups of volunteers performing manual tasks (and then asking the volunteers to clean the bathrooms???),
• hostile, disruptive volunteers or coordinators who are allowed to scare away customers and other volunteers.

And I'm not even getting paid?! I worked for a nonprofit which treated volunteer time the same way we treated employee time - like it was valuable.