Paid Staff and Volunteers on One Team, and Where the Line Goes

Every campaign that lasts more than a few months ends up paying somebody. The driver, the person running the office, eventually a coordinator or two. That is normal and it is not the problem.

The problem is that the rest of the team finds out in fragments. Somebody notices a person is always available on weekdays. Somebody else hears an amount from a third party. Within a month the ward believes everyone senior is being paid, resents it, and stops turning up.

Which jobs are usually paid, and why those

The test is not seniority or loyalty. It is whether the job requires somebody's whole week.

A person who must be reachable every working day, who cannot hold another job because of this one, and whose absence stops other people working, is a paid role. Office coordination, driving, and full-time field management usually fall here.

Everything that can be done around a job or a business is volunteer work, however senior it sounds. A ward coordinator doing a few evenings and a Saturday is a volunteer. The same person asked to be available five days a week has been turned into staff whether or not anybody has said so.

The amounts are a decision for each campaign and its budget. What matters far more than the level is that the basis is stated, applied consistently, and recorded, since campaign spending is reported against rules set by the IEBC and gazetted before each election, and a payment nobody wrote down is a problem twice over.

What goes wrong when the line is unclear

Four failures, all common, all predictable.

Volunteers stop, quietly. Not out of greed. Because unpaid work next to unexplained paid work feels like being the only person who did not know.

Paid people are treated as owing more than they were hired for. Then they burn out or leave in the last three months, which is the worst possible timing.

Coordinators start negotiating. Once one ward believes payment is available, every ward's cooperation becomes conditional, and you are running an auction instead of a campaign.

Nobody can produce the records. Cash handed over at a rally with no note of who, what for, or on whose authority is the single most common source of a campaign money quarrel. The nerve centre piece covers where those records should live.

Reimbursement is not payment, and must not look like it

This is the distinction that saves most campaigns.

Reimbursement covers a cost the person actually incurred doing the work. Transport to a ward, airtime used for campaign calls, printing. It is not income, it should not vary with how much the campaign likes the person, and it should be available to every volunteer on the same terms.

Say so out loud and repeatedly, because the honest reason many people cannot volunteer is that they cannot afford the matatu, and a clear reimbursement rule opens the campaign to people who are otherwise excluded from it.

Then run it like a rule rather than a favour. A stated basis, a simple claim, evidence where evidence exists, one approver, and payment within a stated number of days. The moment reimbursement becomes discretionary it stops being reimbursement and starts being patronage, and the whole team can tell.

Paying a volunteer without converting the team into a payroll

Sometimes one person genuinely needs to be paid in an otherwise unpaid ward structure. Handle it in the open.

Explain the basis rather than the amount. "This role is five days a week and nobody can do that unpaid" is an explanation people accept. Silence is not, and silence is what campaigns choose.

Make it a defined role with a start date, an end date and something it is measured on, not a permanent status attached to a person. Review it at the end date. And be careful about paying somebody who was already doing the work happily, because paid work is rarely as freely given as the volunteering it replaced.

What every arrangement needs in writing

One short note per paid person: the role, what it covers, how much, how often, who approves it, when it ends, and what it is measured on.

Not a contract drafted by an advocate. A page, signed by two people, kept where the campaign's money records are kept. It protects the person being paid at least as much as it protects the campaign, and it is the difference between a disagreement in 2027 and a public accusation.

What to do this week

List everybody currently receiving anything from the campaign, including the people receiving it irregularly and informally. Write next to each name what it is for and who approved it.

If any name on that list would surprise your coordinators, that is the piece of work. Decide whether it is a paid role, a reimbursement or something that should stop, then say which it is before somebody else tells the ward first. Related: handling a team member who has become a problem.