We were signed up for an activity that was also pulled. Like many of you I was having a tough time at the beginning of the month finding volunteer opportunities. We are visiting Disney in late February to celebrate my goddaughter's birthday, and the volunteer ticket was mostly for her benefit. This plus the new $99 Florida resident 4-day pass ($86 if I recall correctly for her as a child) would be a substantial savings. Another friend decided to join us and will actually be getting a cheaper deal than the kiddo's ticket (~$15 for her, ~$21 for kiddo). My sister and I have annual passes so we were already good to go.
We had some time but obviously I didn't want to leave it to the last minute. Many opportunities were for after our trip, and my goddaughter is 6 years old now so that limited our opportunities. There was nothing until suddenly an opportunity appeared asking for over 3,000 people. And that was when I caught it, volunteers were signing up steadily. I signed the four of us up but I was dubious about it from the start. Not only were they looking for 3,000 people, but it was a basic 2 hour beach clean-up. Seemed a little too easy to me, not to mention thinking of the logistics of verifying 3,000 people on a windy beach. But hey, it was on the site, must be legit.
Well, my misgivings led me to keep looking and when I found a different opportunity right in our area (instead of 40 minutes away) and two weeks sooner I signed us up. I left the beach one too just in case we weren't able to complete the new one for some reason (a food drive). The food drive turned out to be very easy as well. This morning I got an email from the organization and sure enough, that first event was canceled. It's still two weeks away and I wasn't surprised. We'd already collected our cans and dropped them off today. But then I realized how upset I would have been if we hadn't already had this other opportunity. And I thought of the literal hundreds of people if not thousands who were receiving a similar email, who might become frustrated with the project. Volunteer opportunities have been hard to come by, we were lucky to get our spots with the food bank. We gave much more than the minimum, through no fault of our own, our neighbors were just overjoyed we weren't selling Girl Scout cookies.
Last week my DH and I both signed up with a Disney approved choice, today I was notified that now Disney will not accept it. We are scheduled for Thursday and the agency was notified today. They are checking to see if since we already signed up, scheduled our time if we will still receive our voucher or not. At any rate we will still do our time since it is not the agencys fault that Disney is changing things.
