Volunteering: 2023 In Review
As is true of many nonprofits, volunteerism is the backbone and lifeblood of the CGC. As a staff of 10, there is only so much our passionate hearts can accomplish. They say it takes a village, and our village includes some incredible individuals who have dedicated their time, energy and talent to accomplish just over 6,000 hours of work in 2023!
So, what was accomplished in those hours? Last year, we hosted either a community garden workday, a Treeforestation workday or a Hauck grounds workday during 23 of the 32 weekends from March to October! Some Saturdays, we were working with volunteers on opposite sides of the city. Our volunteers constructed a hoop house to support our ReRooted program, planted over 3,000 native prairie plant plugs, supported community gardens throughout our network and helped us put on our first Fall Native Plant Festival for over 1,100 attendees—and those are just the highlights! Keep reading to delve further into the amazing work done this past year.
Horticulture Team
We are so fortunate to call beautiful Hauck Botanic Gardens our home, and our volunteers help us make the place shine. With roughly 10 acres to maintain, we couldn’t do it alone—and thankfully, we don't have to! Our beloved Dirt Crew is a group of stellar individuals who have been volunteering regularly on the CGC grounds for years or even decades. And during the growing season, we’re fortunate to have many volunteers join us every Friday to help with garden maintenance and plant propagation. In 2023, we were also joined by a handful of Master Gardeners who devoted considerable time to our grounds. All told, volunteers spent just over 1,650 hours at our Hauck home.
One of the major projects our Horticulture Team helped us execute in 2023 was building our hoop house. Over the span of a week, volunteers with carpentry backgrounds and can-do attitudes helped build our ReRooted plants’ new home. It now serves as a sheltered place for the native plants we propagate to grow up.
Our Horticulture Team also played a crucial role in transplanting seedlings and keeping our native plants looking happy and healthy throughout the growing season. This process requires countless hours of watering, weeding and transplanting throughout the entire growing season. Due to volunteers’ efforts, we were able to grow more than 3,500 native plants and 300 native trees and shrubs for our Fall Native Plant Festival and still have plenty for the Hauck Botanic Garden, allowing us to significantly increase the number of native plants on our grounds.
Conservation Team
Our Conservation Team put in 969 hours of work in 2023! Most of that took place at our two active Treeforestation sites—St. Xavier and Walnut Hills High Schools—where we’re working to restore healthy ecosystems in local greenspaces.
At both our sites, volunteers helped us cage recently planted trees to make them easier to locate for follow-up care and to protect them from deer. The large white tubes serve as clear indicators that something of importance is planted there and needs to be checked on.
In a collaborative effort between the CGC, Cincinnati Parks, the Walnut Hills Bio-Eco Club and over 40 volunteers, we also installed 3,000 native prairie plants on the edge habitat at Walnut Woods of Evanston. In one day, we were able to get all those plants into the ground! The plants were small, but the attention to detail and care taken in planting each one was apparent.
Urban Agriculture Team
This was a big year for our volunteers working in community gardens. The CGC supports over 60 such gardens in the Greater Cincinnati area, but until we created our volunteer teams in 2023, it was difficult for us to put out calls directly to people interested in helping with urban agriculture projects. Many of the gardens in our network are self-sustaining, but there are times—like spring cleaning and fall harvesting—when they can use a helping hand, and now we can more effectively coordinate volunteer workdays to support such efforts.
In 2023, our Urban Agriculture Team assisted 13 of our community gardens across 31 workdays and 852 hours! Volunteers helped weed, mulch, compost, prune, plant and harvest herbs and vegetables that can go directly back into the community. Some of our favorite moments from this season were:
Our Urban Ag Team showing up to help do some heavy lifting, moving yard after yard of mulch to help the West McMicken Community Garden help establish their new space.
A whole family attending a community garden workday at Concord Street, where the kids helped harvest an abundance of tomatoes, carrots and peppers.
Corporate groups who come to community gardens learning more about their coworkers in a couple hours in the garden than the years they have worked together in the office.
Multiple groups of high school students learning what a tomato looks like when it’s still on the plant or how spicy a habanero pepper really is during school service days.
Volunteering with our Urban Agriculture Team in our community gardens lets each garden’s community know that they are seen and cared for, whether the individual volunteers live there or not. We are grateful for the willingness of our volunteers to explore new parts of town and share in the community that can only be built inside of a garden!
Education Team
Our Education Team supports our K-6 grade Compost Kids field trips and 7-12 grad EcosySTEM field studies that run during the spring, summer and fall seasons. As a small staff, we could not invite as many students to our grounds as we do without the support of our volunteers. Having the extra help allows us to divide students into multiple groups that rotate through stations, spend more time answering questions and truly engage with students in our space. In 2023, twelve very engaged Education Team volunteers helped us run 13 Compost Kids and 18 EcosySTEM programs, reaching just over 900 students and teachers.
Our Education Team provides a great opportunity for university students who are looking for experience in their field. We’ve had them start volunteering with our Compost Kids field trip one semester and then move on to help with Lil’ Sprouts the next. Volunteering with our Education Team also allows people with passions for teaching and nature to share their skills in retirement. Education has no age limit or boundaries, and we’re grateful for a team that’s willing to learn, grow and share all that nature has to offer with the next generation!
Events
Our Events and Outreach Team plays a crucial role in the success of our two major events: the Plant Sale (now GrowFest) in May and the Fall Native Plant Festival in September. These events provide an opportunity to bring our diverse constituents together in one space, supporting our mission of building community.
Volunteers help with the planning, set-up, operation and tear-down of these events, and we truly could not pull off these large-scale endeavors without their help. From greeters to check-out attendants to bakers extraordinaire, our volunteers make these events possible. Some help us curate our list of plants to ensure we have a unique selection of species available . We rely on the advice of these avid gardeners in seeking out new cultivars and their personal experiences and knowledge in helping shoppers. In 2023, volunteers also played a major role in conducting our online sale in the spring by helping us produce descriptions for each species and pull and distribute online orders for pick-up. In 2023, almost 200 people put in more than 2,000 hours of work on our major events!
Staff Changes
Another big change we saw in 2023 was the re-establishment of the Community Engagement Coordinator position after the staff member formerly in the position shifted into the newly created role as Conservation Program Manager. We’re excited to welcome Shelby Beckner as our new Community Engagement Coordinator and look forward to seeing what her energy and dedication bring to our volunteer program. Look for her at your next workday!
Looking Ahead
With full-time staff support for our volunteer programs once again, we have much to look forward to in 2024. The calendar is already filling up with workdays in community gardens, on our grounds and at our Treeforestation sites. And volunteers can look forward to three appreciation events this year in the spring, summer and fall along with a happy hour during National Volunteer Appreciation Week in April. It’s a great year to be a CGC volunteer!
Not registered yet? Check out our Volunteer page to find your teams and start getting your hands dirty doing something that matters.