Volunteer Vibes - Behind the Scenes

Shelly Sharon

ESRA offers its thousands of members, as well as the general public, many wonderful opportunities in activities, clubs, courses, lectures, entertainment and more, in a very large variety of fields, on an ongoing basis throughout the year.

All of these opportunities which are offered to you have to be planned, set up, coordinated and arranged. Reservations have to be made and monies collected.

Do you have any idea who carries out all these duties? Do you know that our threeoffices are run largely by a band of skilled and committed volunteers?

The Magazine office is currently run only by volunteers. All the planning of the material in the magazine is carried out under the guidance of the editor of the magazine, Merle Guttmann, who is also the Founder and Life President of ESRA. She has a volunteer band of column editors, an editorial board, proofreaders, contributors, an office administrator who handles the adverts and accounts, a webmaster, web workers, and other office volunteers. All the magazine distributors are volunteers - they pack, label and sort bundles for the deliverers on a bimonthly basis.

The ESRA office at Beit Fisher in Raanana has a full-time office manager, who heads a team of volunteers.

The Gan Rashal office in Herzliya houses the General Manager of ESRA, the Administrative Manager, three other staff members who deal mainly with financial matters, the Community Project Coordinator, and myself - the Volunteer Coordinator. Every day volunteers work in the office, giving ongoing support to the staff, and they handle many duties which enable the affairs of ESRA to run smoothly.

This band of volunteers in the offices answer telephones and make phone calls throughout the year, urging volunteers to complete and return the vital Volunteer Information Forms for insurance purposes, which have to be submitted annually to Bituach Leumi and the Registrar of Nonprofit Organizations in order for ESRA to function effectively. The volunteers keep and maintain the ESRA database, they send out and receive books of tickets for our annual raffle, receive donations and send out receipts, help with photocopying, collating, taking bookings for events and receipting monies, answer enquiries of a general nature and give information to prospective volunteers. They are the 'face of ESRA' to the general public in many ways and they do a wonderful job throughout the year. Their involvement requires skills of various sorts at various levels, time, commitment and patience.

If you would like to become a part of ESRA in any of these activities and support the organization in this way, please contact me:

Shelley Sharon at 072 220 1482 or This email address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it.