I think you need a mix: paid, skilled staff topped up with volunteers. For some people giving their time is an alternative to giving their money - they might have lots of one and very little of the other! One local charity here has a shop that is run by a paid manager but the rest of the staff are volunteers, or sometimes 'clients' helping out. That mix works really well. With the best will in the world if you have one appointed volunteer trying to manage various other volunteers it can all get narky very fast! But the salaried person is clearly the boss.
One of my relations was a Socialist (with a capital S) and so I was quite surprised to find he was very anti-volunteering. I thought he would be in favour of everyone pulling together with a common goal, but his answer was simple. "We shouldn't need volunteers, people should be paid for their work. That's what we should be aiming for". In many ways he had a point - it certainly gave me something to think about.
But seeing as this is the 'rant' thread I'll confess to something that really annoyed me. A few years back our local secondary school was running a series of events to raise money for a local charity that helped poor communities in Africa. The charity itself is a very worthy cause, set up by a lady who had seen the number of AIDS orphans in one community she worked in and set up an orphanage, employed people to look after the kids, then expanded it with buildings, then got in training for the kids so they could learn skills for when they grew up. When she returned to the UK she carried on the good work from over here. They wanted to build some big pools for farming fish so they could learn fish-farming and provide high protein food for the kids, but also become more financially self-sufficient by selling off any surplus: a great idea all round! Then I found out - by asking some quite specific questions - that this group of (older) schoolkids that were setting up and running the fundraising events each had a fundraising target which was pretty high - like over a thousand quid or something. It turned out that
well over half of each target was their air-fare and bed/board - this wasn't specified anywhere in the promos - you really had to ask to find out. We were coughing up more for the kids to go on an adventure to Africa to build things for this charity than we were giving to the charity itself. And this is a pretty middle-class area, most of our kids are
not hard up. TBH even if the young volunteers had paid for their own adventure and just raised the charity portion I'd still be thinking that if I wanted a well-built fish-farm I'd want a local builder guy to do it rather than an excited 15 year old from the UK (better
and cheaper). And I told the school as much - but their attitude was that people get sponsored to climb Kilimanjaro and walk the great wall of China so it's just the same sort of thing. And again if I'm being really honest I don't sponsor them either, unless people are paying for their own flights and board. They also thought that people like me were 'spoiling things' for the kids and the charity. So I phoned up the charity and made my donation direct and told them why and the nice receptionist said that I wasn't the first and they'd had quite a mixed reception to it. I suppose from their point of view each kid raises awareness and £300 for them - it's just from my point of view for every £10 I give £7 goes to British Airways. I tried really, really hard to convince myself that this is quite the normal thing but I just can't. My kids - pretty young at the time - were gloomy because they liked the sound of 3 weeks in Africa when their time came (the assembly had been pitched very well) and they knew I'd never ever let them sign up for it. As it happens we never had to cross that bridge as 2 years later the program was dropped - whether because of complaints or the fact that in the final run some kids got Typhoid I don't know. Rant over
Sending lots of healing vibes for the poor bunny 
Horrible one about my lovely RB Rosie the cat and woke at 5.30am to her sister puking up a hairball on my bedroom floor! 
So can’t get back to sleep despite being doped up on my epilepsy meds, may have to creep in for tea and get told off for ignoring piglets in a minute! 
Got to go through the pigs room to the kitchen so not a chance Luigi’s missing out on early grub! 