ZAMI NOBLA, flyer advertising its April 26, 2025 Volunteer Planting Day. Source: ZAMI NOBLA.
Keeping a community organization running involves work that rarely appears in an event headline. Two published invitations make some of that labor visible: tending a garden and contributing professional or creative skills.
ZAMI NOBLA advertised a volunteer planting day at its Biggers House on April 26, 2025, from 9 a.m. to 3 p.m. Its event materials welcomed people without gardening experience and offered lunch and T-shirts. This was an invitation to help with a Black lesbian elder-housing project, not a measurement of volunteers’ personal spending or a report of how many people attended.
Southerners on New Ground made a different request in its 2016 first-quarter update. It invited members and allies to contribute fundraising, video transcription and captions, interpretation, translation, art, graphic design, research and copy-editing skills. The update described that work as part of building and maintaining an organization. Its dated appeal documents the range of skills requested, rather than a current list of vacancies.
National estimates provide another perspective. Independent Sector and the University of Maryland’s Do Good Institute announced a value of $36.14 per volunteer hour on April 21, 2026, using 2025 data. Organizations use that estimate to recognize donated labor. It is not a wage paid to volunteers, and it does not calculate what ZAMI NOBLA or SONG participants spent to contribute.
The two invitations reveal tasks behind the public-facing work. Gardening takes time. Captioning takes skill. Translation and research take preparation. Recognizing those contributions starts with naming the work people are being asked to do, while keeping any claim about their expenses separate from what the sources actually document.
Carolyn Satchell
October 16, 2026
