Current Volunteer Opportunities

Gardening Matters periodically takes volunteers and interns. We have several one-time volunteer opportunities available for annual or special events, as well as medium and long-term ongoing projects. Please contact us with your interest in volunteering or interning.

One-Time Volunteer Opportunities:

Community Garden Spring Resource Fair
Friday, March 30th 2012 (set up, afternoon)
Saturday, March 31st 2012 (multiple 2-hour shifts throughout the day)
The Community Garden Spring Resource Fair is an annual networking and learning opportunity for community gardeners all over Minnesota. Keynote address in the morning, exhibitor tables, and many workshops throughout the day means we need many hands on deck to make sure this event goes smoothly. Main volunteer duties are set-up, clean-up, greeting/check-in, preparing workshop rooms, and more.

Community Garden Day
Saturday August 11th 2012 (throughout the day)
Be a Gardening Matters Ambassador! With nearly 60 gardens usually participating in the day, we need your help to get to all of them to document the day. Gardening Matters Ambassadors are armed with handouts, a camera, and a notebook for notes, and are assigned to visit 4 gardens nearby where they live. After the day, report back to Gardening Matters with photos and any feedback about what you saw. Pretty easy!

Ongoing Volunteer Opportunities: We have volunteer/intern opportunities 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. We are in South Minneapolis, near the 23, 11 and 18 bus lines. Opportunities include:

Data Entry and Administrative Support
It may sound boring, but 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.

Research
Research community garden, urban agriculture, and/or public policy-related topics. This could be a long-term project, or a shorter-term update of existing Gardening Matters fact sheets.

Skills Desired: Strong writer, comfortable with online research, good phone and email skills

Sign 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.

GIS Mapping
We are interested in GIS mapping community gardens for acreage.

Skills Desired: GIS map skills, willingness to teach others how to use GIS maps

Photo Organizing
Gardening Matters has lots of great garden photos which need to be tagged and organized. We would like to develop a slideshow of the best photos, update photos on our website, and enter and tag photos in Flicker. This would primarily be an in-office project.

Skills Desired: Organization, comfortable with some phone calling and emailing.

Communications/Media
Organizing media database, filing articles, developing a new Gardening Matters brochure. This would be a primarily in-office position.

Skills desired: Communications skills, well-organized, graphic design

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