How to avoid activist burnout

For me I find it very tough to say no. However I have found that when I spread myself too thin I am doing nobody any favours by committing to projects and then not having the energy or time to see them through.

On the other side though volunteer groups need to make sure that they are also considering the needs of the volunteers. It is in their self interest to make sure the volunteers are not burning out.

As activists, it's important that we keep our activist workload sustainable. If our physical and mental health suffers from our activist workload, then we need to cut back. Provided there are enough activists in a group to carry out the tasks of the groups we're involved in, this shouldn't be a problem.

The big problem is when everyone in a group is overextended and/or burning out. This is nearly the case in the group I belong to, the Vancouver Socialist Forum. We try to meet once every two weeks, with the intent of holding one public forum a month on issues relevant to radical, socialist politics.

Of the 15 members in the group, I'm the only one who is not involved in other groups. So many other members have other activist meetings they attend on a bi-weekly or monthly basis, that it becomes hard to set a meeting time. It's hard to find a time for a meeting that doesn't conflict with meetings of other groups that multiple members are involved in, or some members who go out of town for work or activist stuff, or one member who gets bogged down with school work. Plus, some members will argue against certain meeting nights because of important activist events that one or more members want to attend.

When we do have meetings, we usually only have half the group in attendance, so enough people are absent such that we can't set a time for the next meeting that won't conflict with too many other things. So we wind up trying to organize many of our meetings over the internet. What often happens is that one member sends an e-mail suggesting time for our next meeting, a few other members replying that they can't make it, and then one member suggests we postpone the meeting because too many people can't make it. Which results in the meeting getting cancled, because the inertia created by the suggestion to cancel the meeting can't be overcome.

We've been trying to establish a 3 person coordinating committee that would have responsibility for setting meeting dates, but every time we have a meeting we put off the vote on who will be on the coordinating committe because members want to nominate people who are not present.

[ 05 June 2008: Message edited by: Left Turn ]

How do you choose between events? I am becoming pessimist. Are there wide-view left-wing rallies?