Intern Opportunities
Volunteer Opportunities
Intern Opportunities (Winter, 2015): We have intern opportunities (unpaid) that take place in the office, either for academic credit or for valuable work experience. If you are interested in an internship opportunity, please follow the instructions for application on the internship posting.
Events and Publicity Interns (2)
The interns will help with the planning, publicity, and execution of these events that focus on building the capacity and connections of gardeners in the community. This means the interns may help: coordinate resources, communicate with a variety of stakeholders, drum up support and excitement through social media, conduct community outreach, coordinate volunteers, provide logistics support for staff members, and other tasks as necessary. We are a small but mighty organization; the intern will work closely with the staff to carry out these tasks.
Volunteer Opportunities: We have volunteer opportunities (unpaid) that take place in the office, and some that could take place off-site. All volunteers and interns will need to come to the Gardening Matters office for training during the normal business week. We are in South Minneapolis, near the 23, 11 and 18 bus lines.
Container Gardening Resource Volunteer
Our areas of current need:
- Data Entry and Administrative Support
This is our #1 volunteer need! If numbers, spreadsheets, and organization is your thing, WE NEED YOU! This helps us keep our records up to do and get timely information out to the public about community gardens.
Skills Desired: Experience with Access and Excel (Microsoft Office 2010), a good head for spreadsheets and data management, strong attention to detail
Time Commitment: 2-4 hours per week - Communications/Media
Social media communications, website and email postings, drafting press releases, designing fliers and other communications tools. This would be a primarily in-office position.
Skills desired: Communications skills, well-organized, graphic design
Time commitment: at least 4 hours per week.
- Drupal/ Database Design and Maintenance
Assist in functionality and design of our drupal-based website and database system.
Skills desired: Significant drupal website experience, web design helpful
Time commitment: As much as you can give us! - Research and data analysis
Analyze focus group and survey data. Research community garden, urban agriculture, and/or public policy-related topics. We have several research projects that this volunteer could assist with, depending in skill-set. This could be a long-term project, or a shorter-term update of existing Gardening Matters fact sheets. We usually only work with students who have a demonstrated skill set in a particular area and/or that are working with a professor or have outside supervision for their research project.
Skills Desired: Strong writer, comfortable with online research, good phone and email skills
Time commitment: Project-dependent.
Other occasional volunteer needs:
- Translation
We would like to develop a book of common garden signs translated in different languages. This book would be available to community gardens to copy and laminate as needed for their gardens. For this project, we need volunteers interested in calling gardens to see what signs and languages would be most helpful to them, and volunteers to translate (Hmong, Somali, Spanish, Russian, and more). An artistic volunteer could also create icons for signs (ie a picture showing “please do not pick the vegetables”, etc.)
Skills Desired: Comfortable calling/emailing garden coordinators, fluent in a language other than English, art/graphic design
- General Translation
Gardening Matters periodically needs bilingual volunteers to help with translating materials and/or workshops and events. We would like to compile a list of interested bilingual volunteers to contact as opportunities arise.
Skills Desired: Fluent in a language commonly spoken in the Twin Cities, comfortable with written and oral translation.
