Location: All Parks, Phoenix Office, Special Outreach Events
Host: Rita Marie (courtesy Valley Focus, a Public Affairs Program serving the greater Phoenix community and surrounding areas, brought to you by Sandusky Radio. Valley Focus airs simultaneously on 93.3 KDKB-FM, 100.7 KSLX, 97.9 KUPD-FM, 1440 KAZG-AM on Sunday mornings from 6 am – 7 am. Learn more about Vally Focus 
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Guest: Nicole Armstrong-Best, Volunteer Resources Specialist
Summary: Hear about the range of volunteer opportunities available for people willing to donate their time and/or expertise; both in the parks, by living on-site, or at special events and assignments.
Time: 10:30 See also Volunteer Program Home Page
Announcer:
3. 2. 1. Now Rita Marie.
Host:
Good morning Phoenix, this is Rita Marie. And welcome to this week's edition of Valley Focus. It's time for everyone to get out there and enjoy the Arizona sunshine. And what better way to get in touch with the great outdoors then volunteering at the Arizona State Parks. The parks offer such a wide range of educational and recreational opportunities. There are parks located all throughout Arizona, so if you live near one of the parks you may want to find out more about volunteer opportunities. State Parks are always looking for community members who'd like to take some of their free time and devout it to either a one-time project or a long term assignment. With us in the studio this morning to talk about volunteer opportunities is the volunteer resource planner from Arizona State Parks Nicole Armstrong-Best. Welcome to the show Nicole.
Nicole Armstrong-Best, Volunteer Resources Specialist
Thanks for having me Rita.
Host:
Nicole, now each of the state parks have different amenities and different activities and programs, so my guess is that each park has very different volunteer opportunities.
Armstrong-Best
They do. It really does depend on what the focus on the park is, but we do have similar types of opportunities, for example, every park that has camping available we have volunteer who support the camping activities. We also do hiking in most of our parks, biking, fishing, boating, you know, all of the general types of outdoor activities you would expect. But we also have historical parks and at those parks we do museum type work, we also have volunteers who do re-enactments so they wear appropriate period clothing.
Host:
Oh how exciting!
Armstrong-Best
Yes. It's a lot of fun. And they do presentations to try to bring history to life to our visitors. We also do a lot of science work in our parks. So we have volunteers who help us, you know, count Agave and things we need to know in order to better protect our resources. So there's a a lot of different opportunities.
Host:
So in becoming a volunteer, I'm assuming there's some kind of training involved. You do train your volunteers before you stick them in somewhere and say "Here."
Armstrong-Best
Absolutely. And it really depends on what type of volunteering you're going for. Obviously if you want to help with visitors you need to know about the park that you're working at, and usually about the community around it so you can help direct visitor's activity. And that's pretty easy training to get through. But if you're doing something in a museum or re-enacting, or providing tours, or working with our school groups who come and visit there's a longer training period involved. For example at Kartchner Caverns we have a group of fabulous volunteers who do the tours in our cave, so they are the ones who are taking our visitors through and really sharing their passion and their concern about those resources. We also have volunteers who provide tours at Riordan Mansion up in Flagstaff and are very passionate about the whole development of the Flagstaff area, the timber industry, the arts and crafts movement, and want to share that story with our visitors. We have volunteers at Oracle State Park and Red Rock State Park. Oracle being in Tuscon and Red Rock being up in Sedona who provide specific programs for school children in season. We train them in covering all of those real specific geological and natural history academic subjects that the kids need to get.
Host:
So besides actually volunteering at a parks, I read somewhere you have opportunities for Live-On sites at these parks?
Armstrong-Best
Right. We do have what we call On-Site Volunteers. These are people who are traveling in their RV and are willing to donate six weeks or more to join us on the park and live on the park and volunteer. Now a lot of those people do our basic campground host duties, which includes taking care of the campground, making sure the campers are happy and doing what they need to do, providing campground talks sometimes; those kind of activities. But we do have at Kartchner Caverns, and Lyman Lake and Alamo Lake we have volunteers who help out with touring, or with Alamo and Lyman, they help us with our market: selling live bait and fishing tackle and ice and things like that. And we are currently looking for On-site couples for Lyman Lake State Park and Riordan Mansion State Historic Park. We tend to fill up pretty quickly with the on-site, especially in the winter months because we are a destination for winter visitors, but we still need help in the summer. So if anyone out there wants to come out and help us Lyman or Riordan we're looking for them right now.
Host:
Now at the other state parks and you mentioned they need help too, do you find the number of volunteers has decreased since the beginning of the year.
Armstrong-Best
No, no, no. In the summer because of the hear in Arizona yes, but it's a seasonal decrease not an overall decrease. In fact we are utilizing more volunteers this summer than we had in past summers. We are busier than we were last summer and it's due to the economy of course, less people are traveling out of state, more are staying in and making use of our parks which is fabulous!
Host:
Now what do you think would motivate someone to volunteer?
Armstrong-Best
This is just my opinion: If you have a connection to nature and i believe that our urban society has lost that connection and we need to build it back, not only for our physical well being, but I believe truly for our spiritual well-being, to make a connection to nature. And this actually gives you an excuse to go and be outdoors. And maybe not in a physical way, maybe you want to help with Birding talks to our visitors and walk slowly around, you don't have to be a power hiker or the mountain biker, but we certainly have places for those people too. I think our parks work for everybody because they can be everything to everybody.
Host:
What I think is exceptional is you have a passion or desire to learn more about the birds you see in Arizona, you actually will get trained at the park in that field so you can go out and teach other people about it.
Armstrong-Best
Exactly. We love that because someone who just learned is passionate and shares more with our visitors, and we want our visitors to come out and have a wonderful experience and want to come back; we make that connection person to person. That's what our volunteers help us do.
Host:
Nicole, let's say there's some people out there listening who say "Wow. Hey. I want to volunteer!" What do they have to do?
Armstrong-Best
Well, they can go online at AZStateParks.com and go to the Volunteer home page and there's a lot of information there. Or they can go to any individual park page if they're interested in a specific park. But let me let you about some general volunteer opportunities we have, especially if you don't live close to one of our parks, we do have opportunities to get involved with special events and special projects throughout the state. For example special events coming up we have Suvoyuki Days at Homolovi Ruins State Park and that's August 1st and 2nd. And we need volunteers to help hand out information and help set up booths. This is a Hopi event and there are all kinds of wonderful displays. It's a good excuse to get out of town, come learn something new and help us at the same time. And information about that will be up on our website and a way to register. Other events coming up include Aldo Leopold celebration at Lyman Lake State Park in August as well. And then our big apple festival at Slide Rock State Park on the 19th and 20th of September. And we will need a lot of help at that event. It's a fun event because we do apple picking, apple sales--
Host:
All right there on the park grounds?
Armstrong-Best
Absolutely, yes!
Host:
Oh wow, exciting!
Armstrong-Best
It's a lot of fun. And we do need lots of volunteer help. Those kind of events are a great opportunity to come out with your family, these are family friendly events, brings your kids, bring your brother, bring your aunt, come on out and help us and then have an opportunity to enjoy the event as well. So there's those kinds of opportunities, we also have Special Projects. This is where you can come out and help us paint a fence or clean an area, plants some trees, or clean up a trail or whatever those kinds of physical activities. We are working on putting together Service Projects for National Public Lands Day this year's which is September 26, so if you're interested in signup and coming out to our of our parks just for a day and getting involved, we'd love to have you. If you're part of a group, a corporate group, a church group that you want to bring out, please consider that, call us, I'd love to talk with you about it. If you can't come out to the park and you're stuck in the city we can still use your help. We have a Phoenix office we'd love to have your support. Our main gift shop is in the Phoenix office and we need help sorting our items, getting them priced, getting them sent out of the parks and I"m also looking for volunteers who love to talk about the parks because we get called to do presentations all the time and booths at community events and we'd love to have some volunteers help with that. So you can also do something in town, if you can't get out to the parks. Come out and get involved, we need your help!
Host:
Nicole thanks so much for stopping in this morning to talk with us.
Armstrong-Best
Thanks so much for having me!
Program Ends
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