The Truth About Volunteering in a Parent Club: When Does Membership Become Self-Serving?

Parent clubs have come under fire again.

Giving back to a breed often leads you on a path of service to the organization, but that’s not always an easy task. Parent clubs are the host organization of a breed; they are the mothership and own the AKC Breed Standard that breeders work to adhere to. For many, me included, learning to work within the constraints of the “parent” (club) can prove to be challenging. Like all things in life, checks and balances must be made to maintain a neutral and consistent breed message. What has become obvious to me over the many decades of membership I have had in and out of various parent clubs is that not everyone has what it takes to assimilate with the clubs’ policies. Some just simply don’t fit into their culture, even if well intended. Volunteerism is not for the faint of heart. What I know now that I didn’t know at the time of service was that having a group or flock mentality is more conducive to successful outcomes than having your own creative expertise. It is important that anyone who wishes to volunteer master the art of compromise.

The Club Mantra is not your own, it’s theirs and we are just the conduit that shares it with the audience. The concerns come when the parent fails to monitor the messaging and the board become complacent in service, allowing the teams of chairmen to take over the breed’s public messaging. It is at this point that the volunteers garnish more control than the membership body. This leads to the orchestrated misuse of the parent club by the overzealous volunteers who have an expectation that the parent club is simply a resolution center for conflict. Excessive volunteerism can change the club narrative to that of the volunteers. Under the guise of volunteering, individuals can cause the loss of a parent club’s “nondenominational” message. We have seen this happening in many parent clubs.

As a new club member, you typically get a warm reception upon joining. All clubs are looking for the next great volunteer. You are welcomed into the flock and they are eager to see how your membership can further their mission. So, they will size you up a bit in order to get comfortable and eventually discover your many talents, and where they could put those to use. At the beginning, your relationship with the parent club is sort of transactional: I’m going to join and you’re going to do for me. In return, the club is saying, “Yes, we’re going to allow you to join and we’re going to put you to work, and here’s how you can volunteer and here’s how you can serve the breed.” I think this “good” volunteerism can go poorly when it’s left unchecked by an unbalanced or weak parent club leadership. Meaning, one person or one faction can dominate, and oftentimes, does take over the message of a parent club. And while your volunteerism appears somewhat innocent, it becomes rather self-serving. It starts to take on a personal role and reflects the individual over the collective.

The overzealous volunteer doesn’t have to be a new member. Every parent club goes through the regime changes that determine the direction of the club. Most clubs shift power from faction to faction over time. It’s never truly balanced. It’s not as if everyone comes to the table with an equal voice. There are true leaders in clubs and many followers. Sadly, we are not all equally represented within the boardroom of the parent club. I think it’s a fallacy to believe that this is the case. Part of the negativity around this reality is the struggle with deciding what the collective voice should be. To protect, preserve, and monitor a breed’s status is not the only role of the parent club. It is important to remember that the parent club is more than the dissemination of information to the public, to breeders, and to fanciers across the globe who participate in and share in a mutual love and understanding of the breed. The organization is there to monitor the welfare of the canine species.

Club members can lose sight of what volunteering is all about when they become distracted by competition within the sport. For example, when the guidelines are set up so that the bar is in your favor, your service is then viewed as self-serving. As you mature as a breeder, you learn that breeding quantity doesn’t matter—breeding quality matters. It was never about the number of champions but about the quality of the champions you produce. You want to raise the bar on what you are producing rather than the number of dogs that you can finish. Eventually, successful people don’t focus on number as a measure of their success. Instead, you start to focus on a higher bar. The number of champions you’ve produced pales next to the number of Best in Show winners that you’ve produced, and that number pales next to the number of Best of Breed winners at a National Specialty.

Having personal goals as a breeder is definitely a balancing act to volunteerism as a club member. Most of the more prominent breeders are too busy raising litters and breeding to successfully dedicate enough of their time to a club. The act of volunteering for a parent club can be thankless. It’s a labor of giving. It’s not one that seeks a reward. It’s a labor of doing for without getting back. This is the very definition of volunteerism. We give to them without the expectation of getting anything back. When you serve a parent club with your talent, it can frustrate and exhaust you, and it can make you, not the parent club, a target if you become the sole messenger.

I see the parent club as the hub, and all the spokes around them support the club. Members support with trophy donations and DNA samples. They support by showing up, by entering their show, by going to Meet the Breeds, by representing the club at the Hunt Tests and Obedience Trials. There are many ways that the parent club does outreach where multiple factions should participate together. But when participation becomes exclusive rather than inclusive, it’s often hard to get through to that overzealous volunteer that they might be the problem. Service is a balancing act.

Over-volunteerism can lead to a feeling of ownership of the tasks you have volunteered your time for. This is where things can go wrong, when one individual feels as if they’re doing all the work and their volunteerism becomes “blanket” volunteerism: I can do this, I can do that, I’ll take care of this. The lack of a balanced volunteer force, and the apathy of weak leadership, will result in a loss of the club’s collective messaging. We know that it takes an army to represent a parent club. It’s not an individualized activity. Parent club representation is a group effort, all-inclusive, and the very best things for the parent club occur when people put down the banner of their own kennel and display a united front of breed unity. When the power of one supersedes the common goal of many, all the promotion and all the positive in the volunteerism becomes tainted by self-promotion. Each member must work for the common good of the group, not the individual.

What I learned years and years ago was that my place in a parent club, my personality, my portfolio, my platform, was really too big to fit into this small parent club, and I didn’t fit their role or their mold of what a parent club volunteer looked like. I was willing, but my bravado was too difficult, too strong, too challenging for them to harness and we were never a good fit. And while I am grateful for a lifetime membership in my parent club, I have also experienced not being allowed into a parent club (probably for the reasons I’ve listed here), but that doesn’t mean that I don’t have the ability to still represent the breed. I think knowing where you are in the volunteer network is necessary. In my case, I think it’s important to do some self-awareness that maybe while my intentions may have been good, I do understand that it’s a lot to managing a high-profile personality. My voice and message can be louder than the collective smaller voice of a parent club. It is okay to walk away and move on with your own path.

Over-volunteerism in a club ends in exhaustion for all parties. That lack of diversity in your volunteer force is very detrimental to parent clubs. We have seen it: members come in strong, they’re capable and do quality work, and yet they have no ability to be managed. In their service, they have become the gatekeepers of information to the kingdom. And when that falls apart? They have the passwords for social media, they’re the administrator for Facebook, and they hold the copyright on the Illustrated Standard drawings. They have the keys, and the leaders within the club have their hands tied! When discord happens, the safe transfer of information doesn’t happen seamlessly. They transfer and resolve the situations begrudgingly and with a great deal of angst as bulletin deadlines lapse because of an unwillingness to follow through; the club’s messaging gets lost. It’s an ugly end for the over-volunteer. Both the parent club and the volunteer become exhausted, and the over-volunteer becomes the victim who then runs and disparages all parent club leaders generally on the social media pages where they’ve maintained the administrative control.

I do think there is a remedy for this: maintaining a diverse representation on the boards of parent clubs.

I have always felt that parent clubs should be run as a small business, that they are in the business of the promotion of a breed. They need to be financially sound. Many of them don’t have that mentality. It’s a business endeavor to be a member of a club. You are in the business of raising funds to pay for an event, to pay for Fast CAT and Barn Hunt and Rally and Obedience and Conformation shows. You have to have the financial resources to keep a parent club viable, and in order to do that, your focus should be on the recruitment of members to participate, but also to give financially by entering your shows and donating money to a trophy fund.

Parent clubs are fluid entities. They are usually changing leadership, and they will always exist in one way, shape, or form. They don’t die. They change their form and direction, and sometimes that’s towards you and sometimes it’s away from you. The best among us learn to navigate those challenging times by walking away gracefully, knowing in the end they will circle back around to us when needed. It will come back to you, or they will recognize your abilities and your talents, and the time will be right for you to volunteer again. And when that time comes, you will have matured and proven your longevity in the breed, which will make you a better volunteer for the parent club.