Doing good while reading good — join the Nonprofit Good News-Letter.
50 Reasons Why It Is Hard to Run a Nonprofit — Challenge 27: Volunteer Danger
A Saturday morning at a nonprofit build site. A volunteer who has never held a nail gun is handed one after a five-minute orientation. At a food bank across town, a 70-year-old retiree is stacking 40-pound cases of canned goods onto shelves above her head. At a domestic violence shelter, a new volunteer now knows the safe house address — information that, in the wrong hands, could get someone killed.
Three different organizations. Three different kinds of danger. One thing in common: none of these volunteers are covered by the safety systems we've built to protect workers.*
If you run a nonprofit that uses volunteers, here is what you need to understand about the legal infrastructure that's supposed to keep workers safe: it doesn't apply to your volunteers.
OSHA does not cover volunteers. The agency's published interpretations — in 1992 and again in 2005 — are unambiguous: volunteers who receive no monetary or other compensation are not employees subject to the federal Occupational Safety and Health Act.
Your paid kitchen staff get OSHA protections. The volunteer working the same shift beside them does not.
The Bureau of Labor Statistics excludes volunteers from its Survey of Occupational Injuries and Illnesses. That survey is how the federal government tracks who gets hurt at work. Volunteers aren't in it. Which means there is no systematic federal data on how many volunteers are injured each year in the United States.
Roughly 60 million Americans formally volunteer with organizations each year. Nobody is counting how many of them get hurt.
Workers' compensation doesn't cover them either — not in most states. Since volunteers aren't paid employees, they fall outside the system.
Some states make exceptions for volunteer firefighters and EMTs. A few, like Washington, allow nonprofits to purchase optional coverage for volunteers, but it covers only medical costs, not wage replacement. Most states offer nothing at all.
Your volunteers are working in your buildings, serving your clients, and handling your equipment. And they are doing all of this with none of the legal protections that a minimum-wage employee would receive on day one.
The Volunteer Protection Act of 1997 makes this picture even stranger.
The Act shields individual volunteers from personal liability for harm they cause while acting within the scope of their responsibilities — as long as the harm wasn't caused by willful misconduct, gross negligence, or criminal behavior. If your volunteer accidentally injures someone while doing assigned work, the volunteer personally is protected.
Your organization is not.
The Act explicitly states that nothing in it "shall be construed to affect the liability of any nonprofit organization or governmental entity with respect to harm caused to any person."
The individual volunteer has more legal protection than the organization that deployed them. The nonprofit absorbs the risk while the volunteer walks away shielded by federal law.
Most executive directors I've worked with don't understand this distinction. They assume the VPA protects the organization. It does the opposite — it protects the volunteer and leaves the organization exposed.
A Venable LLP legal analysis of nonprofit volunteer liability documents multiple cases where organizations were held liable for volunteer injuries and volunteer-caused harm.
In one case, a nonprofit was found responsible when a volunteer was injured by an unstable stage structure at an event — the organization had a duty to provide reasonable safety precautions, and the fact that the injured person was volunteering didn't reduce that duty.
In another, a nonprofit was liable when a volunteer instructor who lacked proper credentials caused a participant's death. The organization knew about the credential gap and deployed the volunteer anyway.
The legal principle is consistent across jurisdictions: nonprofits owe a duty of reasonable care to their volunteers, and "voluntary participation" does not shield the organization from liability when it fails to meet that duty.
Physical danger is the obvious risk. But volunteers also face emotional harm that most organizations never address.
Research on compassion fatigue and secondary traumatic stress documents the toll on workers who are regularly exposed to others' trauma. Symptoms include exhaustion, anger, reduced empathy, impaired decision-making, and increased absenteeism.
The research focuses on paid workers in clinical and community service roles — but there's no reason to believe volunteers in similar roles are less vulnerable. If anything, they're more so, since they typically receive less training, less supervision, and less institutional support than their paid counterparts.
The volunteer at the domestic violence shelter. The crisis line volunteer. The mentor working with at-risk youth. These roles carry real psychological weight, and most organizations treat volunteer emotional health as an afterthought — if they address it at all.
The gaps in legal coverage are real, but they aren't unfixable. Three structural moves close most of them.
Get volunteer accident insurance. This is one of the cheapest risk management investments a nonprofit can make.
According to Insurance for Nonprofits, medical reimbursement coverage runs roughly $3.95 per volunteer per year. Volunteer liability coverage ($1 million) costs about $2.15 per volunteer per year. For a 100-volunteer organization, total coverage with all options runs roughly $1,500 annually — less than many nonprofits spend on their holiday party.
Some of the largest volunteer-driven organizations in the country already provide automatic medical accident and accidental death/dismemberment coverage for every sponsored volunteer. If they can do this at scale, so can yours.
Write safety policies specific to each volunteer role. Not a generic handbook that covers everything and addresses nothing. A document that names the actual risks for each position.
The volunteer on the build site faces different dangers than the volunteer doing data entry, who faces different dangers than the volunteer working directly with clients. Each role should have its own risk profile and its own safety protocol.
This also protects you in court — documented, role-specific safety policies are evidence that you took reasonable precautions.
Track incidents yourself. OSHA won't do it. BLS won't do it. So you must. A simple incident log — date, volunteer name, what happened, what you did about it — creates institutional memory. It lets you spot patterns before they become catastrophes. It also demonstrates due diligence if you ever face a claim.
Call your insurance broker and ask one question: "Does our current policy cover volunteer injuries, and if not, what would it cost to add?"
If the answer surprises you — and for most nonprofits, it will — you've found the gap this post is about.
*I'm an attorney. I think about these things a lot and worry about them every time I see nonprofits using volunteers. But I'm not providing you legal advice in this post. Hopefully, I'm raising awareness.
This is part of an ongoing series exploring the 50 challenges outlined in Managing Your Nonprofit for Resilience (Wiley, 2023). Subscribe to Nonprofit Good News Premium for implementation tools and deeper analysis.