VolunteerSpotlight | Dakota Radford
Helen Douglas-Hart had a dream of developing a natural area that would reflect the native habitats of east-central Illinois. Her dream became a reality in the late 1960's by planting a 33-acre nature preserve. Today, the Douglas-Hart Nature Center features more than 70 acres of prairie, wetland,
and forest habitat. Also, it provides the people of the surrounding communities the unique opportunity to learn about and discover the wonders of nature.
Today our volunteer Spotlight shines on Dakota Radford, who uses VolunteerSpot's online signup sheets to coordinate volunteers at the center.
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Tell us about your organization and your volunteer needs.
Volunteers are vital to everything we do here. The Douglas-Hart Nature Center is located in a rural community in east-central Illinois. Just outside of town, these 72 acres of trees, prairie grasses, and wetlands are surrounded by an expanse of corn fields. Inside its confines, over 10,000 visitors find enjoyment in nature, every year.
The mission of Douglas-Hart is twofold, and the first is to continue to restore the property to the way it was two hundred years ago, before pioneer settlement. Intergenerational volunteers on the “Conservation Crew” work together to remove invasive species and replace them with native seedlings, grown in the greenhouse from seeds they collected last autumn. Volunteers also keep the trails mulched, build trail signs, and construct the waste receptacles and other outdoor facilities.
The
second part of our mission is to provide
opportunities and programs to make
nature available to everyone in the community. Throughout the year, volunteers
work with staff educators to lead field trips, open house events, and traveling
programs. Annual events such as October’s Haunted Trail Hike bring out dozens
of volunteers wanting to generate festivity for the community, while getting
them outdoors. During the summer, Jr. high and high school students work
side-by-side with student teachers, retired teachers, and environmentalists to
lead hundreds of local children who participate in our summer day camps.
Explain how you use VolunteerSpot to coordinate
these volunteers.
In 2012, approximately 640 volunteers donated over 28,000 hours of service to the Douglas-Hart Nature Center. I am proud to be their volunteer coordinator. Since I am also the assistant educator, I am busy! Although it felt like I spent hours a day sending and receiving communications with volunteers via email, phone, and postal, I was still frustrated every time I forgot or didn’t have time to send a volunteer a reminder or an updated shifts roster. Reminder emails and an always up-to-date sign-up list were what attracted me to VolunteerSpot right off the bat.
It didn’t take me long to realize that there are many other benefits of VolunteerSpot. I found I was getting a much higher response from younger and more tech-savvy volunteers. While most of the mature volunteers enjoy stopping by or calling me to sign up for something, most of the younger generation prefers to be non-confrontational and to make an anonymous choice, browsing their options on the activity page before drawing any attention from me with their sign-up. Other volunteers use the always-up-to-date activity page to monitor support levels in real time, and will recruit new volunteers from their own social circles to fill holes they see in the roster. I think VolunteerSpot’s services give the information and power of choice to the volunteers, and they respond!
What’s one piece of advice you have for volunteers or their leaders out there?
As a volunteer coordinator, I try to always offer “at least 2.” With the great diversity of volunteers we work with, two is the very minimum number of options we need to offer, no matter what it is we are offering: weekday dates and weekend dates, postal newsletter and electronic newsletter, full shifts and half shifts, green t-shirts and blue t-shirts, indoor work and outdoor work, in person sign-ups or online sign-ups at Volunteerspot. Now we are all on board!
Anything else you’d like our readers to know?
I can’t thank VolunteerSpot enough for offering these services at no charge to volunteer leaders everywhere. It is a valuable gift for so many organizations. I continue to find more and more ways to use VolunteerSpot at the Douglas-Hart Nature Center, and would recommend it to anyone.
For more information visit www.dhnature.org
We salute Dakota and all the other volunteer leaders out there making a difference. If you're using VolunteerSpot, write and tell us about what you're doing and give us a chance to shine our Volunteer Spotlight on you!! Just email us at [email protected].