AIBU to be stunned that this service is entirely run by volunteers?

[crosspelican]

I was at a presentation this week given by Oxfordshire Lowland Search & Rescue - it turns out that when people go missing, the police don't always actually go out & look themselves, they call organisations like this, in particular if it's your granny with dementia, or a teen who intends to commit suicide. These people can be out looking within 20 minutes, but of course when they find the person (or their body) it doesn't get the press those twats on Ben Nevis got, because nobody is going to tell the local press delightedly that their suicidal teen has been found safe and well and is thrilled to be going back to school tomorrow.

They said that the difference with their callouts is that the person often doesn't know they are lost (dementia) or doesn't want to be found (suicidal).

They're all volunteers, their equipment (vehicles etc) is all donated. They're not the first port of call for ALL missing people - they had 70 callouts in Oxfordshire last year, but I am really surprised that this is not fully funded by the police, because surely they are a branch of the police?

oxsar.org.uk/what-we-do/

Is there anything that you were surprised to find out is NOT funded by taxpayers?

hospitals need volunteers to keep going, even things such as filing, as a volunteer I sometimes get a request to help with an unexpected admin task

I confess I'm surprised about the filing thing, flustered; obviously it depends what's being filed, but given the sensitive nature of hospital records doesn't that create privacy/GDPR issues?

It's bad enough at our Community Managed Library where I volunteer - made worse because the Council, instead of liaising directly with us, have handed hundreds of thousands to "partners" who are supposed to fulfil this role but are, in common with so many funding sponges, utterly useless. Half of these "community capacity builders" aren't even literate, which seems a bit ironic where a library's concerned