When the Volunteer Captain Quits Nine Days Out
Your 400-runner charity 10K relies on 60 volunteers across five stations. Nine days before race day, the volunteer captain who recruited 28 of them resigns over a scheduling dispute and takes roughly half the roster with her. Your paid staff is three people. Registration closes in two days at 400 entries. The route permit requires a marshal at every road crossing, and the medical plan requires two first-aiders at the finish. Local sports clubs have offered help but need confirmation within 48 hours to arrange their own transport.
1. Prioritise the recovery actions for the next 48 hours.
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Triage by permit condition first, because those roles cannot be left vacant: road-crossing marshals and the two finish-line first-aiders are non-negotiable and must be filled before anything else. Next, contact the sports clubs within the 48-hour window and confirm firm numbers, even if that means accepting partial crews and assigning them to the highest-risk crossings. Then re-segment the remaining 32 volunteers so no one is double-booked, and convert some roles to lower-skill tasks that can be briefed in 15 minutes. Do not spend the first day on the dispute itself; the operational gap closes fastest if you secure permit-critical roles, then backfill the rest.
A workable target is to lock 20-25 replacement volunteers from clubs, which covers the 28 lost slots minus any you can consolidate. Publish a revised roster with named backups by day three.
2. What should you change in volunteer management to prevent a repeat?
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The single point of failure is that one person held 28 of 60 relationships with no documented roster, no deputy, and no shared contact list. Fix that structurally: require every captain to maintain a shared roster with contact details, name a deputy captain for each station, and set a rule that no volunteer is recruited through only one person. Add a written role agreement covering scheduling expectations so disputes surface early, and a 30-day check-in before the event. Keep a warm bench of 10-15 past volunteers who can be called on short notice.