Meet Liz Meek – Why is volunteering at Welty important to you?

Welty has a core group of volunteers who work to help facilitate field trips from local school districts and other nature based programs throughout the year. They all put in quality time learning and executing programs. We need every one of them and more.

Program volunteers get to choose their level of commitment. If assisting with a program, they need to attend a brief training for that specific field trip, shadow staff until they feel comfortable with what is expected and help lead two to four field trips of that type in a season. The average number of hours a single program volunteer puts in during a year is roughly between 15 and 20. And those hours really help! When we have program volunteers it allows us to take larger groups and classes and split them up into smaller groups where there is more opportunity for hands-on personal interactions.

We are so lucky to have Liz Meek as one of our volunteers. Liz is a retiree who enjoys working in her garden and newly completed greenhouse. She and her partner, Bill, travel all over the United States in their RV to participate in Civil War reenactments specializing in field artillery: firing cannons. She loves spending time on the road, learning about new places, and her rescue dog. When she is not traveling, much of her time is spent volunteering with us!

This year alone, Liz has assisted and helped with 43 programs, that is roughly 10% of all programming conducted in 2022 for a total of roughly 65 hours of contact time. This does not include the time she spent driving with me around Rock, Green, and Walworth counties to get to libraries during the summer. After presenting her with a Volunteer Naturalist name tag and a Welty mug for her coffee, I asked her, “Why is volunteering at Welty so important to you?”

Liz answered, “People need to understand that the environment sustains us. We need to know that the environment provides us with food, water, shelter, and space to live. Without it, there is no us. I like focusing on children’s programming because adults already have ingrained bad habits.” 

The world and Welty need more volunteers like Liz who see the value of hands-on science-based environmental education. If you would like to join us as a volunteer in 2023, please reach out to me. You can let me know that you are interested in volunteering by emailing info@weltycenter.org or completing a brief online survey to let me know how you would like to get involved. 

Be like Liz and come join us!