When your family, friends, church, synagogue etc. find out you know how to build web sites, the first thing they ask is "Can you help us?" Often the answer is "Yes, but you cannot afford to pay me." Doing work for free is still work, and it has its own set of rewards and pitfalls.

A lot of us started out by building a volunteer web site for somebody, and it is usually an experience we would not want to repeat.

All three of us have built community sites with Drupal as volunteers. We've picked up some techniques to prepare the expectations of the beneficiaries, and to empower them to maintain their sites.

We will profile a few volunteer projects, and what we've learned from them, and what experience and rewards have been gained back:

http://faiththedog.info
http://hobokenstopstigmaweek.info
http://uucpalisades.org
http://LincolnSchoolPTA.net
http://shaarezedekwny.org (brand new Drupal 7 synagogue site)
http://worldpromise.org (yes, it's Joomla)

Session attendees will have an opportunity to discuss their own volunteer projects, with a focus on tuning current projects for success.

Randall presented a session about volunteering at DrupalCampNYC 9 - a deeply committed group attended. Additionally, Randall has proposed this topic as a session for Drupalcon Denver: http://denver2012.drupal.org/program/sessions/will-code-coffee-how-volun...

Tom Sherlock, Lanny Trager, and Randall Goya have conspired to form the ToLoRo Group to get paid for some of their work.