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Volunteering related to Geocaching


Enspyer

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I am going to be a high school senior and I am required to get in 20 volunteer hours before this December. It all has to be done with the same non-for-profit organization. Although I haven't been caching much lately it still came into my mind when I was supposed to "think of something I like to do." I was hoping to perhaps coordinate one or two CITO events, but unless I could prove there was an organization I was "working" for that would not fulfill the requirements.

However, I am hoping someone here might know of other things I could do with GPS technology. In the past I have volunteered teaching Geocaching skills with Girl Scouts, but that isn't going to add very quick. Any ideas, even opportunities just generally related to outdoorsy stuff, I would appreciate. I'm 17, I'm near Syracuse NY, and I have a driver's license and usually a car at my disposal. I'm putting this out here, and I'm also looking around online and at other organizations until something turns up. Thanks for any help! :mad:

 

If this is the wrong forum I am not going to be offended if you move it. I am not sure how much it is exactly related to Geocaching, but off-topic is too crazy for this stuff IMO. ;)

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Most parks that you would CITO are "organizations".

 

However it sounds like they want you to volunteer for soup kitchens, Aid for Families, Crisis Centers and other orgnizations.

 

Your Local United Way chapter can point you to dozens of orgnanizations who can use that 20 hours much more than the world needs a CITO. The bonus is you don't have to fight to stretch the term organization beyond what's intended.

 

BTW if you could find something that lets you hang with folks while getting them to exercise you can take them caching. America on the Move may have a NY chapter and they may be more than willing to have you set up a "chair to cache" event. Hard to say. One older gent from Hawaii who posted in these forums a few years back was very happy with caching and what it did for his health. He was 90+.

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What kind of class can require you to volunteer?

 

Up here on Ontario you need 30 hours of time put in. and it's not for a specific class it is over and above regular class assignments. I believe it fits into the concept that if you teach kids that volunteering can be fun they will be likely to volunteer later in life.

 

When I was younger I volunteered in a hospital - it had its moments but most of the time it was very cool. I met a lot of neat people that way.

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What about with Big Brothers/Big Sister type organizations?

 

A series of 3 to 4 hour weekend hikes combining the ideas of CITO and caching, as well as teaching about latitude/longitude?

 

You could do a different group of kids each week and maybe end it with a picnic somewhere with caching contests that are more just a treasure hunt than needing coords and you might even see it one of the wooden nickel makers would donate a few as keepsakes?

Edited by mousekakat
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What kind of class can require you to volunteer?

 

It seems to be the thing to do lately. When I was in high school (graduated 1996) we were required to do X hours of community service in order to graduate. It was something they had just started at the time, and I think we had to do 10 hours. Most of us were given tasks, rather than having to find them on our own. I used my Eagle Scout project to cover this requirement for me, but a lot of friends helped out building a local playground.

 

To the OP. I agree with RK. Rather than try to stretch the requirement to fit a CITO, check out the United Way, or whatever other local non-profit organization. They are always in need of help, and likely know what needs to be done to make sure your school is aware that you've fulfilled your obligation.

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What kind of class can require you to volunteer?

 

It seems to be the thing to do lately. When I was in high school (graduated 1996) we were required to do X hours of community service in order to graduate. It was something they had just started at the time, and I think we had to do 10 hours. Most of us were given tasks, rather than having to find them on our own. I used my Eagle Scout project to cover this requirement for me, but a lot of friends helped out building a local playground.

 

To the OP. I agree with RK. Rather than try to stretch the requirement to fit a CITO, check out the United Way, or whatever other local non-profit organization. They are always in need of help, and likely know what needs to be done to make sure your school is aware that you've fulfilled your obligation.

I graduated in '95 and we did not have anything like that.

 

I am certainly not against volunteering. I just don't see how it is applicable to require someone to volunteer. Then it isn't volunteering.

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What kind of class can require you to volunteer?

My thought too. Requiring you to volunteer kind of takes the volunteer out of volunteering. :mad:

It's for the "participation in government" class which is required for graduation. I already am going to have volunteering from other organizations but none of them are going to add up to 20 hours alone. If we could just add up the hours from each place I could top it off in a day but apparently that is not the point. I like the primary volunteer work I do now (soup kitchen-style stuff) but it's not particularly time intensive because they only need a set number of people working at a time and I'm already put on regular schedule with them.

 

I like your point Renegade Knight that I shouldn't try to stretch the definition. I also like the idea of doing outings except for the responsibility for the safety of the people. I have no first aid training or babysitting experience.

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I don't understand how any public school can require you to do anything outside of school.

 

Even homework can be completed at school if you don't waste your time yakking and goofing off.

 

Just go pick up trash in a park and have a park ranger sign off as suggested. (I would be kind of ticked off it was a class i was in.)

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There might be opportunities for you to use your gps skills and equipment to do trail mapping for your local parks or conservation programs. I work for an Environmentally Endangered lands program in Florida, and we use gps extensively. We sometimes use volunteers to map trails, species (ie. gopher tortoise burrows), etc. We helped the parks department map bike trails and so forth. You might call around to parks, natural resources departments, conservation or environmental lands programs, etc. Many programs like this use volunteers to do other outdoorsy work like trash cleanup, plantings, exotics removal, etc.

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I am going to be a high school senior and I am required to get in 20 volunteer hours before this December. It all has to be done with the same non-for-profit organization. Although I haven't been caching much lately it still came into my mind when I was supposed to "think of something I like to do." I was hoping to perhaps coordinate one or two CITO events, but unless I could prove there was an organization I was "working" for that would not fulfill the requirements.

However, I am hoping someone here might know of other things I could do with GPS technology. In the past I have volunteered teaching Geocaching skills with Girl Scouts, but that isn't going to add very quick. Any ideas, even opportunities just generally related to outdoorsy stuff, I would appreciate. I'm 17, I'm near Syracuse NY, and I have a driver's license and usually a car at my disposal. I'm putting this out here, and I'm also looking around online and at other organizations until something turns up. Thanks for any help! :mad:

 

If this is the wrong forum I am not going to be offended if you move it. I am not sure how much it is exactly related to Geocaching, but off-topic is too crazy for this stuff IMO. ;)

Talk to your city, they can likely use you.

 

One of the things our association (the Alabama Geocachers Association, DixieCachers.com) has done to cement relationships with the City of Huntsville, for example (beside CITOs), is to volunteer to work with city management to use our GPS to locate trees that need maintenance or cutting along city streets.

 

We also volunteer with the Cahaba River Society to waypoint canoe put-ins, pull-outs, hazards and interesting places along the Cahaba Watershed, a river that runs through Alabama.

 

I volunteer with local Search and Rescue teams as a Ham Operator with GPS navigational skills, which is handy for them in both communications and in SAR K9 drills and actual searches to map areas, assign teams and keep track of who is where.

 

LOTS of folks need volunteers that know the GPS system!

Edited by TheAlabamaRambler
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You might try checking with your local Multiple Sclerosis Society chapter.

My wife and I have volunteered to help them with their walks and MS-150 bike rides for the last several years. The bike rides are a really fun event and go 75 miles one way on Saturday, then retrace the route back on Sunday for a total of 150 miles. It's one of their biggest events here in Florida each year and we even have some olympic hopefuls that use it for training as well as for the benefit of MS. Many of their workers are volunteers that either have MS themselves or support a family member who has it. Because of the nature of the illness, many of their volunteers can only help out for a couple of years or so until they become too debilitated by the illness (or their family member needs more attention).

As a consequence, they have a high turnover rate with volunteers and they can use all the help they can get. I have been told several times that they need help more than they need donations of money. Lots of people are willing to send some $ their way, but few are willing to give their time.

I suspect that is the norm for most organizations of this type.

Once every 2 or 3 years we get a truly heart-felt thank you from someone at one of the events. Getting one of these is a kind of reward you can only get from being a volunteer, and gives you a good feeling about yourself that is extremely rewarding. One of these can hook you on volunteer work for life. :mad:

 

Good luck with your volunteer service, wherever you decide to do it.

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I graduated in '95 and we did not have anything like that.

 

I am certainly not against volunteering. I just don't see how it is applicable to require someone to volunteer. Then it isn't volunteering.

 

If I recall correctly, I think we were the first class to be required to do the community service deal, and at that time we were pretty much the only school in the county doing it at that time...I don't remember for sure, it's been a little while. :mad:

 

I do completely agree with you. I suppose I understand trying to "teach" people a sense of civic duty/pride/whatever, but forced volunteerism doesn't make sense. That's a lot of why I basically copped out of it by getting it covered under something I had already done.

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I am going to be a high school senior and I am required to get in 20 volunteer hours before this December. It all has to be done with the same non-for-profit organization. Although I haven't been caching much lately it still came into my mind when I was supposed to "think of something I like to do." I was hoping to perhaps coordinate one or two CITO events, but unless I could prove there was an organization I was "working" for that would not fulfill the requirements.

However, I am hoping someone here might know of other things I could do with GPS technology. In the past I have volunteered teaching Geocaching skills with Girl Scouts, but that isn't going to add very quick. Any ideas, even opportunities just generally related to outdoorsy stuff, I would appreciate. I'm 17, I'm near Syracuse NY, and I have a driver's license and usually a car at my disposal. I'm putting this out here, and I'm also looking around online and at other organizations until something turns up. Thanks for any help! :mad:

 

If this is the wrong forum I am not going to be offended if you move it. I am not sure how much it is exactly related to Geocaching, but off-topic is too crazy for this stuff IMO. ;)

 

I'm the proud dad of 14 year old fraternal twins so I understand your situation.

What you're being required to do is called community service. It's quite common nowadays even in college.

Being a geocacher you obviously have a love for the outdoors but besides just picking trash up off the ground I don't see much in the way a GPS unit is going to help you unless you do something like teach a basic beginner course in the sport of geocaching or orienteering to kids.

The thing about picking up trash is that it leaves no legacy. And I believe they want you to leave something. By that I mean people in the community probably won't see the fruits of your labor by picking up trash. Don't get me wrong. The principles of CITO and Leave No Trace are important but the results are basically invisible.

Take that love of the outdoors and find a park ranger or forest ranger who can use some help on a project.

Is there a food bank in your town? They're usually run by volunteers.

Do you have a community center where classes are taught to kids or they hold special events for the elderly on a regular basis?

You did something for the Girl Scouts before. Do it again. Twenty hours isn't much. Include a couple hours of instruction one time and a hike on another.

Anyway, good luck and remember to try and have some fun doing it. The rules say nothing against having fun while performing community service!

Edited by TopangaHiker
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Ditto what Capaldo said. I volunteer for a couple of Florida agencies. I've used my GPSr to map birdboxes, the stations where annual bird counts are done, nests of a protected species, an orchid inventory in the Green Swamp, and generated trail maps for a nature center. Taught the gpsr unit (+ a little geocaching) of the map and compass class.

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Would the National Map Corps work? It is volunteering to update USGS topo map information. Check out the forum section devoted to it in the GPS related topics area. You could easily put in 20-30 ours working on a few maps worth of info. But I don't know how they track time and if they accept community service type student volunteers.

 

My personal recommendation- the local Animal Shelter or Humane Society is always looking for people to clean and take dogs for walks and help socialize the animals. And they usually appreciate having someone come to them and ask- if you had 20 hours of free labor... what would you do with it?

 

A CITO or two with the local Forest Service or just going to the FS or parks system and offering them 20 hours of unpaid labor might be the way to go. Paint some picnic tables, clean up an unoffical dump or two, plant some trees, etc.

-J

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I am working on setting up a CITO in a marsh that has an Audubon Society nearby. There is a webcam on the nearby osprey nest (see this thread around page 9-10) and so far the young ones have been caught in plastic bubble wrap (fire department called, wrap removed), in fishing line, with the young one left dangling from the nest (fire department called, bird rescued), and one of the parents got his talons caught in a plastic bag and was para-sailing until he/she could get rid of it! It's late in the year to get this going, since the birds will be gone in a few weeks, but I'm hoping to set one up soon or for spring. Maybe there is an Audubon near you that needs help. Here's a list of the IBAs (Important Bird Areas) in NY. You could see if they need help with some of their projects, or if they need a CITO. Or maybe you can offer to mark and map some of the IBAs with coordinates for them. Just a thought.

 

I have to disagree with the thought that picking up trash is not leaving a legacy. It leaves a cleaner world, and that is a HUGE concern for kids today. I'd rather not leave the legacy of a trashed world for the next generations.

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this doesn't have anything to do with outdoors or GPS but I am always looking for high school volunteers to help me run the athletics at the k-6 I work at. phone some principals and see if they have anything before/after school you can help with. the legacy is the positive effect that you can have on the kids. they like me and enjoy the activities we do but they really look up to the high school kids who come and help out.

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To bad you don't live in NE Ohio. The Cleveland Metroparks largest geocaching event of the year is in a few weeks and for a number of the volunteers, 20 hours is easy. A lot of work has already been done but we also have the pre-event set-up meeting, the day of the event itself, and the post-event clean-up to take care of. Do any of the land management organizations in your area have an active geocaching program? If yes, give them a call and see if they can use some help.

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I would guess that maybe at least one of the local geo-organizations might be an actual non-profit entity. Ask.

 

Yep, check and see if whatever local geocaching groups are actual non-profits.

 

If not, would any of the your local parks or trails associates qualify?

They can likely come up with stuff you can do, cito, trail maintanance, painting, maybe planting trees or removing invasive weeds, and so on.

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[ I also like the idea of doing outings except for the responsibility for the safety of the people. I have no first aid training or babysitting experience.

 

Don't worry about the first aid experience, I have done several hikes with my local group, the group leader has first aid training, the hikes for my group are about 14 kids and 4 to 6 adults. I can't remember the last time anyone needed first aid, your just there to hike with the kids.

 

I like Briansnats idea of trail maintenance, one of my local state parks has a "Friends of the park" non-for profit organization. Cleaning a park can have a lasting impact, I was involved in two local CITO's that cleared a 40'x400' area of brush and trash, close to two tons of it in a very public area. There was a huge difference when we were done.

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What kind of class can require you to volunteer?

 

It seems to be the thing to do lately. When I was in high school (graduated 1996) we were required to do X hours of community service in order to graduate. It was something they had just started at the time, and I think we had to do 10 hours. Most of us were given tasks, rather than having to find them on our own. I used my Eagle Scout project to cover this requirement for me, but a lot of friends helped out building a local playground.

 

To the OP. I agree with RK. Rather than try to stretch the requirement to fit a CITO, check out the United Way, or whatever other local non-profit organization. They are always in need of help, and likely know what needs to be done to make sure your school is aware that you've fulfilled your obligation.

I graduated in '95 and we did not have anything like that.

 

I am certainly not against volunteering. I just don't see how it is applicable to require someone to volunteer. Then it isn't volunteering.

 

My high school started requiring it for graduation a few years after I graduated. My brother had to do it. It was a joke because anyone could sign off on the community service. A lot of student where having their parents sign off for them. I think my brother had one of his friends sign for him and he signed for his friend.

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Our school gives credits for service hours - if you can document them, and write a reflection (which seems to be a requirement in many current educational things...), you can get a half credit for 60 hours or a full credit for 120, every year. A credit in HS is the equivalent of a year long class - a half credit is a half-year class. No requirements, but we have many students that choose to do this.

 

My only opposition to volunteerism is when you are required to do something such as soup kitchens or hospitals. There are countless volunteer opportunities which benefit someone somewhere, and doing anything which fits this category is, in my opinion, volunteering and service. In my opinion, running a website which is used for something beneficial to people, and not being paid for it, is service. Some people would say this isn't service simply because of it having to do with the internet - you have to slop food in a soup kitchen to be serving. But just because you find it fun, and just because many people consider it a hobby, I don't see why it wouldn't count.

 

Obviously, simply geocaching isn't service. But CITO? Absolutely.

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