In 2021, we celebrated a socially-distant Volunteer Appreciation Week with "5 Days of Volunteer Appreciation." You can see each day's messages, preserved below.

Happy Volunteer Appreciation Week!

As we kick off this week of celebrating YOU, we want to start by acknowledging just how weird the past year has been. The Museum was closed for 5 months last year, and a great many of our volunteers haven’t been able to contribute to their regular assignments since March 2020. (We had new volunteers join the ranks last spring who still haven’t had a chance to actually do what they signed up to do!) But despite the dramatic shift from the norm, you’ve still managed to collectively support the Museum – through donating your time to unusual pop-up projects, contributing financially to the Museum, being strong advocates for NHMU in your communities, and staying connected to the Volunteer Program. And thanks to your support, we’ve been able to accomplishing some amazing things during this unusual time. Here are a few NHMU highlights from the past year:

• Research Quest Live became a premier educational support to families and teachers in Utah and beyond, as schools all over the world shifted to online education last spring.

• Virtual Field Trips of our galleries allowed guests (and volunteers!) to peruse our Museum even while we were closed to the public.

• Two successful fundraising campaigns (in lieu of our normal summer gala) helped raise critical funds to support NHMU’s work across the Museum. 

• Our onsite Field Trips program pivoted to virtual with “Stay Curious, Utah!” The new program has been a great success, reaching 44,000 students (and counting!). 

• The Museum’s first major public virtual event, Behind the Scenes Reimagined saw over 4,200 people tune in for live webcasts of tours and interviews with collections staff.

All of this was made possible and successful because of the support of volunteers. So, whether or not you’ve been able to log any official volunteer service hours in the past year, we know that you are still supporting NHMU, cheering on our work and our slow-but-steady return to normalcy. And we are so incredibly grateful for you. Thank you for being wonderful, reliable partners and advocates. We are eager to get you all back into your regular roles at the Museum, and we can’t say “thank you” enough for sticking with us through this turbulent time.

With an incredible amount of gratitude,

Nichelle O'Saurus, Interim Community Programs Manager

Happy Volunteer Appreciation Week!

We all miss the things volunteers aren’t able to do under current pandemic conditions, but we also need to celebrate the incredible things you DID do in the past year! Check out your collective stats for 2020:

245 volunteers managed by the Volunteer Department (that's you!) donated approximately 13,470 hours of service to the Museum. This is the equivalent of 6.49* full time employees and an estimated dollar value of approximately $352,923.09**! 

When we include Youth Development Programs and our DigiVol Online Transcription Projects*** in the count, across all programs, 932 volunteers donated approximately 19,056 hours of service to the Museum. This is the equivalent of 9.16* full time employees and an estimated dollar value of approximately $499,276.29**!!

We know that these numbers all would have been higher in a normal year, but they are pretty incredible in their own right. If we extrapolate what may have been, we were on target for another record-breaking year of volunteer service at NHMU. Service at the Museum has been on the rise, growing from 28,402 total hours in 2013 up to 43,590 total hours in 2019. Considering the length of time that most volunteers were unable to contribute last year, seeing just over 19,000 hours for the year is truly amazing; it tells us that in the time you had available to contribute at NHMU, you really gave it your all! Thank you!

We also know that there are many of you who weren’t able to volunteer last year, even though you may have wanted to. And, we recognize, too, that some of our volunteers don’t yet feel comfortable returning to in-person volunteer work – and that is totally understandable. Please know that even if you didn’t record a single hour of service in 2020, we are still SO GRATEFUL for you! Thanks so much for continuing your support NHMU, staying connected to us, and opening the (many) emails that we send you. We can’t wait to get you all back into your roles, and to see what you can accomplish in 2021!

With an incredible amount of gratitude,

Nichelle O'Saurus, Interim Community Programs Manager

Happy Volunteer Appreciation Week!

Yesterday, we celebrated the overall stats for volunteer contributions in 2020, but what were you all actually working on? Well, let us take a moment to thank you for the amazing projects you helped us accomplish last year:

• Over 35 volunteers helped to sew more than 1,000 re-usable cloth face masks for the Museum last summer! These masks have been so appreciated by the guests who arrived at our doors without their own personal protective equipment, and it has really contributed to keeping NHMU a safe place to be during a pandemic.

• More than 35 volunteers helped in the mad dash last fall to organize, assemble, and pack 7,200 anthropology- and paleontology-themed science kits in conjunction with Behind the Scenes. With your help, we were able to deliver hands-on science activities to thousands of families across Salt Lake County at a time when hands-on engagement was especially hard to come by. 

• A small group of volunteers were critical to moving a huge collection of fossils from the Geology building on lower campus to their new permanent home at NHMU last December. This transfer of 3,000 fossil specimens could not have happened without volunteer help!

• A record number of people across the world contributed to our online DigiVol Transcription Projects, including many of our in-house volunteers. Several of you also helped to validate the transcription work that was happening, so that the data was ready to be uploaded into our research databases. (Don’t forget to join us for Museum Insider tonight to hear from Alyson Wilkins, our Collections Digitization Coordinator, on this and other digitization projects that volunteers are contributing to!)

• It was also a record year for citizen science, with more i-Naturalist observations recorded in our area than ever before. We know that many of you participated in building this incredible resource for scientists and citizens alike! (Heads up, April is Citizen Science month, and the City Nature Challenge is just around the corner!)

So, even though you weren’t able to engage in your regular volunteer roles at NHMU, you still came together to help the Museum accomplish some pretty incredible projects last year. Thank you so much for donating your time and energy in new and unusual ways. Your generosity knows no bounds!

With an incredible amount of gratitude,

Nichelle O'Saurus, Interim Community Programs Manager

Happy Volunteer Appreciation Week!

2020 was a very weird year for the Volunteer Program at the Museum. In addition to the unusual pop-up projects you all have been helping out with, we did a lot of other new and unique things together last year:

• Normally, we send 12 newsletters a year – one per month – to keep you up to date on what’s happening at NHMU. Last year, we sent 28 newsletters (23 of them between April and October!). That added up to over 54,000 words to keep you all up to date on the rapid changes that were happening throughout the past year!

• Included with those newsletters were fun at-home activities to keep you connected to the Museum while we were closed. You all worked on 19 Volunteer Quarantine BINGO cards and 18 Gallery Crossword Puzzles! (You can still find past BINGO cards attached to What’s Happening Newsletters from May-November 2020 in the Archives; crossword puzzles can be found on the Continuing Education page of the Portal.)

• Like most other programs at NHMU, the Volunteer Program went virtual last year. We hosted continuing education lectures and tours, social and recognition events, volunteer board meetings, and frequent virtual office hours on Zoom. All told, you spent about 60 hours in Zoom rooms together last year! (Virtual continuing education opportunities were recorded! You can find them in the Archives.)

• We had to get creative about volunteer recognition in 2020. You may recall that, in lieu of our annual awards dinner, NHMU staff set out to personally deliver 2019 service awards (and cool yard signs!) to 115 of our volunteers last fall. It took 13 staff members (plus 2 volunteers!), 5 days, 6 Museum vehicles, 11 different routes covering over 950 total miles, and lots of hand sanitizer and masks, but we got to everyone! (If you want to re-live the fun of our online celebration, it was recorded! You can watch it here.)

Whether or not you were able to participate in any of the unique ways we came together last year, we are so thankful to you for sticking with us and being willing to try new things. Thanks, too, for making the NHMU Volunteer community such a fun one – it was a real blast finding new ways to connect with you all during the isolation of 2020!

With an incredible amount of gratitude,

Nichelle O'Saurus, Interim Community Programs Manager

Happy Volunteer Appreciation Week!

I want to end this week of celebrating you with a message of our sincere gratitude. I hope that there is no doubt in your mind about how much NHMU appreciates the efforts of our volunteers. Whether you volunteer 1,000 hours a year or 10 hours, we are so honored that you’ve chosen to give your time to the Museum. We truly know that without the time and dedication of our volunteers, we could not reach the many goals we are working toward: connecting deeply with the public and inspiring an interest in the natural world; cataloging and databasing our 1.6 million objects (not to mention finding, collecting, and preparing new objects for our collection!); keeping our building and its inhabitants safe and protected; fundraising to support NHMU initiatives old and new. Without your support, none of these things would be possible. We are also incredibly grateful for the goodwill that you all share with your friends and families. Thank you for being our very best advocates and supporters in the community. 

We hope you’ve enjoyed this week of volunteer love, and we hope you’ll join us tomorrow to hear this gratitude directly from our Executive Director! As a reminder, tomorrow, Saturday April 24th from 9:00 a.m. – 11:00 a.m., we’re hosting a very special Volunteer Appreciation Week edition of Breakfast Club. We invite you to stop by NHMU to grab a doughnut, say hello to the Volunteer Program staff, and spend a few minutes getting to know our (still fairly new) Executive Director, Jason Cryan face-to-face (albeit six feet apart). We’ll be hanging outside of the Museum in the drop-off circle/near the group entrance doors, and we’ll be excited to tell you how much we appreciate you when you stop by. We’ll also still have 2020 service pins to give you if you haven’t been able to come see us this week. (Because we still aren’t able to officially host an in-person event, this is strictly a drop-in program to give you just a few minutes of one-on-one time with our Director. Masks are required (when you’re not eating a doughnut), and we’ll be monitoring the crowd size to make sure we don’t exceed safe capacity.)

If you can’t make it, and we haven’t seen you this week, know that we are thinking of you fondly. We miss you, we love you, and we simply can’t thank you enough for being part of the NHMU Volunteer community. 

With an incredible amount of gratitude,

Nichelle O'Saurus, Interim Community Programs Manager