HELP! Need Volunteers to Handout Annual Surveys

Calling all volunteers!  We were handed the annual surveys today to hand out on the following schedule.  We desperately need helpers especially this Sunday, July 10th!

7/10  Paradise 12:30-4:30

7/13 Sunrise    12:30 - 4:30

7/15 Ohana      12:30 - 4:30

7/17 Longmire   12:30 - 4:30

7/21 Ohana       9:00 - 1:00 

7/23 Sunrise     9:00 - 1:00

7/26 Longmire   9:00 - 1:00

7/30 Paradise    8:00 - 12:00

This survey is taken every year and helps us discover who our park visitors are and what they did while they were here.  We need one person to handle each shift, or two who would be willing to share half and half.  You will pick a single spot to stay and hand a survey to pre-selected number of visitors.  Full directions will be given to you when you arrive. 

If you are available please contact Kevin Bacher, Mark Loper, or Maureen McLean.  We truly appreciate your help.

Thank you

Maureen McLean

Coordinator MORA Meadow Rovers

A quick survey for volunteers

Greetings Mount Rainier Volunteers! Hopefully you noticed the BlogSpot announcement for the upcoming Volunteer picnics in August. No? Then please take a moment to check it out. For the last couple years there has been a steady decline in attendance and we volunteers would like to turn that around. We are interested in hearing from you with answers to some questions.

• Do you regularly attend this event? If yes, what is it that keeps you coming to enjoy this special day to honor your work in the Park? If not, what would it take to bring you out for some fun?
   
• What would you like to see included in the picnic?
   
• Would a different month during the season work?
   
• How does a themed event sound? Give us some ideas on this one if you have any.

One thing we would like to emphasize: THIS PICNIC IS FOR ALL VOLUNTEERS! This includes meadow rovers, citizen science, trail maintenance and repair crews, archives assistants, and everyone else who volunteers their time and energy to help out in Mount Rainer.

Please send your responses to volunteer Jean Millan at cgcoastiechief [at] yahoo.com. Thanks! -JM

Complete Volunteer Survey Results

At long last, here are the complete results of the volunteer survey we completed in April. It has been a fascinating process, wading through 157 detailed responses and compiling them into a cogent summary! I hope you will find it as interesting as I did.

First, the raw data:

• Survey results summary
• Survey raw data (with names of respondents removed for privacy)

And finally, a thorough analysis of the results, including statistics, quotes, and action items, as a PowerPoint presentation:

• PowerPoint presentation of complete survey results

Enjoy!

New news and previews of coming events

April and May are always busy months for our volunteer program. I'm getting at least half a dozen calls and e-mails per day from people with questions about volunteering, and we're busy planning projects and training for the coming season. Here's where we stand:

New Volunteers: I've received dozens of calls and e-mails in the past two weeks while I've been traveling from people interested in joining our volunteer program. Thank you all for your interest! I'm a bit overwhelmed at the moment getting caught up from being away, but responding to your inquiries is high on my priority list. Please be patient, I intend to respond to each of you, hopefully within the next week. This is a good place to remind you, too, that I would be extremely grateful for some help keeping up with the start-of-season flood of paperwork and correspondence related to new volunteers. Some of it (the correspondence especially) could even be done remotely. If you'd like to help, send me an e-mail.

Projects: Meanwhile, we're making progress on a project calendar for the summer. My partner on the SCA side, Jill Baum, will be sending me a list of upcoming projects, which I will post here on this blog. We have few specific dates yet, but hope to have them soon. Most of the work will begin in mid June, with a few earlier projects; you can, for sure, set aside June 7, which is National Trails Day and will have a bunch of projects scheduled.

Training: We're also closing in on a training schedule. I have a tentative schedule, at least, for our beginning-of-season interpretation training, our volunteer program management training, and our Conservation Corps training. Volunteers are welcome to participate in any or all of that. I'll post those tentative calendars later today or tomorrow, so stay tuned and watch for it in a later blog entry.

Surveys: Don't worry, I haven't forgotten to get back to you with the results of the volunteer survey. It has been such a gold mine of information that it's taken some time to compile. I'm about halfway through preparing a PowerPoint/PDF summary of the key insights we've gleaned from the survey, and will share that with you, along with the raw data, as soon as I get it finished.

Representing Mount Rainier: As we announced recently, Mount Rainier National Park has received the George B. Hartzog Jr. Award for Outstanding Volunteer Service. Superintendent Dave Uberuaga and I will be traveling back to Washington D.C. next week with volunteers Eva Meassick and George Coulbourn to receive the award on behalf of our volunteer program. Thank you to Eva and George for agreeing to represent us at this prestigious event! It will be a luncheon ceremony at noon on May 8th, attended by the Director of the National Park Service.

Eva and George are both patrol rangers in the Carbon River/Sunrise areas of the park. Both have been volunteering for years and have received our Superintendent's Award for Lifetime Achievement. Eva has passed the 10,000 hour mark for volunteer service since 1987, while George is closing in on 5,000 hours since 1997.

More from the EarthVision Summit: The EarthVision Summit I attended last week, sponsored by the Student Conservation Association near Washington D.C., was incredibly energizing. More than 400 youth attended, and their commitment to service on behalf of the environment was inspiring. I'm still sorting through my own pictures, but meanwhile, if you're interested, you can find loads of images, videos, and stories at SCA's Conservation Nation blog.

In the News: Also out there in cyberspace: The Washington Trails Association now has a YouTube page; spring opening is a struggle at Olympic National Park (no surprise, since we're dealing with lots of lingering snow issues ourself); and Mike Gauthier has posted a "year in review" summary for the Mount Rainier climbing program. I hear also through the grapevine that a citizen climber on our mountain will be receiving a Valor Award next week for help in saving the lives of a couple of other climbers. I'll try to get more details on this and share it with you. Meanwhile, Mount Rainier is one of many national parks nationwide that will receive Centennial Initiative funding to help improve the park; the park is still accepting input from the public about proposed repairs to the Wonderland Trail near Carbon River; and a news website in Massachusetts (!) listed WTA-led volunteer projects at Mount Rainier as one of six examples of Earth Day activities nationwide.

That's all for now; I'll get those training calendars, project lists, and survey summaries posted as soon as I receive them.

Volunteers Respond: Preliminary survey results

Our survey of volunteers is now complete. Thank you to all of you who responded with your comments and insights! There were 157 responses total. Jill Baum and I are sifting through the numbers and written comments, and probably will be doing so for some time. This is a treasure-trove of information that will allow us to identify your greatest concerns and challenges and how to overcome them. It will help us to focus our training efforts this summer. It will help us to determine what's working really well, which we should hang onto, and what's broken and needs fixing.

I'm sure many of you will be interested in seeing the results, too. Here is the first piece: the summary of responses. This contains only the numerical responses. The written commentary is on a separate spreadsheet, which I will post as well as soon as I have a chance to review it and make sure that any potential privacy concerns (e.g. names mentioned) are addressed.

Here are some highlights from the summary:

• Our responses came from a great cross-section of volunteers, including about equal parts those that volunteered only once, those that volunteered 2-5 times, and those that volunteered 6 or more times last year.


• 43% of respondents volunteered less than 20 hours last year, while 25% volunteered more than 100 hours. (We appreciate every one of those hours, by the way, even the smaller numbers.)


• Most volunteers live between 51 and 100 miles from the park. Fully 28% of our volunteers travel more than a hundred miles to get here.


• 42% of our volunteers camp overnight when they volunteer.


• 70% would be interested in carpooling or public transportation.


• The biggest challenge that prevented people from volunteering was schedule conflicts, followed closely in second place by a related concern, lack of time.


• 96% of our volunteers said they were somewhat or very pleased with their experience.


• The favorite volunteer task, by far, was trail maintenance, followed by meadow roving and backcountry patrol. (I wonder if this is partly because more people had experience with trail maintenance last year than any other activity?)


• Summer weekends are the best time for most people to volunteer. However, a healthy percentage look for opportunities during the winter or on weekdays, as well. The same is true for the best times to participate in volunteer training.


• The most popular training opportunities are plant identification, wilderness first aid, ecology, geology, and meadow restoration, followed by trail maintenance, backcountry travel and safety, map and compass use, interpretive skills, and historic preservation.


• Good numbers of volunteers made at least occasional use of all of our volunteer resources except our volunteer handbook. I wonder if that's because it's not useful, or because few people have copies of it?

I promise much more feedback as I have more of a chance to sift through your responses and comments!

Surveying volunteers

I just sent a survey to almost 1,000 people--all of those individuals who volunteered over the past year for whom I have e-mail addresses. It's a short survey, 30 questions, which should take about 15 minutes to respond to, but which will provide us with invaluable feedback about what we're doing well, what we can improve on, and how best to get from here to there.

We sent out a test survey a few weeks ago to about 20 people, and the responses we got back were very insightful. We can already see some common themes in the responses that indicate where we should be putting our energies. (I'd tell you what they are, but don't want to put ideas into your head before you take the survey!) If you receive a survey, I encourage you to take the time to respond to it. It will help us to set priorities for the coming year. If you do not receive a survey, but volunteered this past year, please contact me and I'll send you the link so you can contribute, too. We're accepting responses through April 6.

Once the responses are in, we'll tabulate the results and post the highlights here. It should be very interesting.

One final thing: Special thanks to Deanne Adams, our Pacific West Regional Chief of Interpretation and Education, who invested a lot of time helping us to put the survey together and get it posted.