Overnighter Tip: Shift Help

Even though I know a lot of youth ministers do not like overnighters (for various reasons), we still do them. There are some overnighters that are way too easy and fun to count as work. There are others that just drag on and on and on - which results in taking three days off just to recover. After having done my fair share of overnighters over the years, I have learned a few things. Through a series of posts, I would like to share some tips to think about when planning and participating in a youth overnighter.

Overnighter Tip: Shift Help
*Plan shifts for adults to sign up to help with.

One thing is for sure, getting an adult to help during the entire overnighter is difficult, at best. Most people do not function well on that little sleep. So this year we decided to try something new. We broke the evening up into five shifts. One shift started 30 minutes before the last one ended. This helped with the chance that someone was running late or just slept through.

We set it up so that I was there the entire night, for consistency. There were also a few others who split the night up and stayed a little longer. You need to have at least one person (depending on the size of the group) who knows what has happened and is a consistent figure throughout the night. And it doesn't have to be the youth minister!

I had never done this before and was a little hesitant when it was first mentioned. But I must say I was overwhelmed with how well it worked. It worked on many levels. For one, we were able to fill every spot (now the 4-7:30am spot was a little tough) with at least 2 adults. The students seemed to like the changes in adults. The adults were able to help without getting burnt out and overreacting due to being tired. This point was huge. After 7 hours straight it is easy for certain students to really start "getting to" an adult and this shorter shift schedule helped that not happen.

Here is an example breakdown, for a 7pm to 9am overnighter:
6:30-10:30pm
10-1:30am
1-4:30am
4-7:30am
7-9:30am

Have you done shifts at an overnighter? How did it go?