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Roles, members & volunteers

A short guide to how people fit into your library — and why a member and a volunteer are different things.

Four things, tracked separately

ToyHive keeps four ideas apart on purpose, because in a real toy library they don't always line up:

• Person / household — who someone is, and the family they belong to.
• Membership — their borrowing rights: the membership type they're on, when it expires, how many toys they can have out.
• Role — what they're allowed to do: from Member (borrow only) up through Volunteer, Staff, Committee and Owner.
• Screening — the Code of Conduct everyone agrees to, plus a WWCC where it's required (see Working with Children Checks).

Someone can have any combination. A grandparent might be a volunteer with no membership; a busy parent might be a member who never volunteers.

Member vs volunteer

This is the distinction that trips people up, so it's worth being precise:

• A Member borrows toys. They get the member portal — their loans, holds and account — and nothing else.
• A Volunteer can also help run the library: roster themselves onto sessions, help at a stocktake, and receive "can anyone cover a shift?" messages.

Being a volunteer is separate from what you pay. Someone on the full rate can still be a volunteer; someone on a discounted volunteer rate has agreed to do a number of sessions (an obligation), but the ability to help comes from their role, not their rate.

Because most people at a toy library pitch in, volunteer is the normal case — "Member" is the explicit choice for someone who has said they won't help (for example a short-term or single-loan membership).

When you need someone to cover a shift in three days, you message volunteers — not members, who have opted out.

Becoming a volunteer

• Everyone accepts the Code of Conduct when they sign up.
• When you verify a new person face to face, you choose member or volunteer. Verifying as a volunteer is a quick orientation — what helping looks like and how to roster on.
• A member can be inducted as a volunteer at any time later — or offer to help from their own account page, which leaves them awaiting approval until a coordinator screens them.

Two separate "verifications", easy to mix up: a household is "checked in" once a member is confirmed in person (so they can borrow); a volunteer is "approved to volunteer" once they've been screened (so they can be rostered). Someone can be one without the other. See Rostering & sessions for how this plays out on the roster.

What volunteers can do

A Volunteer's standing powers are deliberately a floor — enough to log in, see the roster and browse inventory, but not to run loans or returns alone. The operational powers for a shift (loans, returns, stocktake) are handed over by the session leader for that shift only. It keeps things safe without burying volunteers in permissions.

That floor is also how Settings → Team sorts people. Anyone whose role stays within it — the built-in Volunteer role, the Member role, or a custom role with no more than those permissions — is listed under Volunteers, collapsed by default with a pending-verification count. Everyone else is the Team: the short list of people with standing operational or administrative access. It's decided by what the role can do, not what it's called, so renaming Volunteer or adding a custom role with real powers moves people between the two lists.

The reference below is generated from the system itself, so it always matches what each role can actually do.