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Thanks for your interest- good volunteers are very important at Oxley Nature Center! There are several ways that you can help. Your schedule can be very flexible, but once your hours are on the planning calendar, we'll depend on you to lead that tour or take care of visitors' questions for that shift. If your schedule won’t allow advance planning, we can talk about what kind of volunteer work would be least disrupted by last-minute changes. Look over the job descriptions here, and let us know which task you'd like to take on.
Spring 2012 Volunteer Training Schedule
The people who conduct tours are called "volunteer naturalists." They work on weekday mornings with school groups, after attending a six-part training. The training emphasizes methods and techniques rather than facts and names. Our goal is to send students and visitors home with a good experience in the outdoors, to pique their interest and curiosity, and to encourage them to continue to learn on their own. In the course of the training, you will see a variety of teaching styles and will become familiar with the trail system.
The volunteer naturalists meet for training two mornings each week, starting on Tuesday, March 6th or Wednesday, March 7th (Tue. & Wed. sessions are the same; Thu. & Fri. sessions are the same) and ending on Friday, March 30th. The training period also includes observing at least one school tour March 13th, teamed up with one of our veterans. After training, weekday volunteer naturalists work one day each week, with 6-10 students at a time, until May 18th. Most people choose to work on the same day each week; others work a more varied schedule. The programs typically begin at 9:45 am, and end at 1:00 pm (it is usually possible to leave by noon.)
If weekday mornings do not fit your schedule, there are plenty of other options:
A condensed version of volunteer naturalist training especially geared toward working with weekend and afterschool and evening tours will be offered in six weekend and evening sessions starting on March 1st. It will be packed into the first half of March, and will end with Part Six on Saturday, March 17th. If a tour is not available during that training period for new recruits to observe, there will be opportunities to team up with a veteran volunteer naturalist before going solo. Volunteer naturalists who work with weekend and evening tours choose 7 solo tour times over the next 5 months.
Visitor center hosts work out of the Interpretive Building. Sitting at the front desk or staying close to the front door and phone, they are the hospitality experts who go out of their way to make each person who visits Oxley Nature Center feel welcome. They greet visitors, hand out trail maps, suggest hiking routes if asked, answer the phone, keep a visitor tally, handle gift shop sales, and may even tackle clerical or custodial chores during any lulls. Most of the training is on-the-job. The first time you work a shift, we may have you teamed up with a veteran, or we will try to spend the first half-hour going over front-desk routines and procedures. Most visitor center hosts work once a month until the end of August, usually on the same day of the month (i.e. first Saturday, or third Thursday.) You may choose to work more frequently, like every Friday. Some visitor center hosts like to arrive at 8 or 9 a.m. and walk the trails before their shifts begin. The shifts are from 10 a.m. to 4:00 p.m., although alternate schedules may be arranged.
"Trail work members" help us with maintaining trails, clearing brush to establish firebreaks, picking up litter, painting, helping with prescribed burns, and other work projects. Check with Vinnie Robinson, Oxley’s natural resources coordinator, to see what's scheduled each month, or to arrange your own solo projects with us for a season. You can also choose to Adopt-a-Trail, walking a chosen trail on a regular basis and reporting on its status. Trail walkers may also choose to maintain their trails if they wish, picking up trash, clipping, weed-whacking, etc. Trail improvements or major repairs should be cleared with Vinnie Robinson first, since some of that work is promised to Eagle Scouts. Trail work crew members set their own schedules, sending in a weekly report of the hours worked each day, until their season ends in August.
The “Traveling Exhibit team” takes a miniature version of Oxley Nature Center out on the road to visit people and places around the state. Road crew members transport booth materials to and from the event and help with set-up or take-down. Exhibit hosts jump up and greet passers-by and invite them to visit Oxley Nature Center or attend a program. We are also looking for a scheduler and a co-coordinator, who could do most of those tasks from home.
The “Marketing/PR Team” would promote Oxley Nature Center and Redbud Valley Nature Preserve’s events and work to increase the number of drop-in visitors. At the very least, some of the work could be done from home, entering data on community calendars. We would expect to see new team members for this fledgling group meeting to decide on goals and a working schedule.
A “Podcast Team” is open to those who would like to help the Oxley staff record, edit, and publish monthly podcasts of full moon walks and daytime nature hikes.
There is always other miscellaneous work, like assisting with prescribed burns, removing invasive alien plants, carpentry, weeding the new gardens, counting butterflies or dragonflies or birds, updating brochures, answering the phone… What skills do you have to share over the next six months?
All kinds of people make good volunteers; the one thing they all have in common, though, is their friendliness and enthusiasm. The high quality of the Nature Center's programs is due to our great volunteer staff. If you would like to join this outstanding group of dedicated people, give us a call and sign up to begin training or to adopt a trail or to put your name on the rosters to be called for work parties or prescribed burns.
Please call if you have any questions: 918-669-6644.