Ongoing Volunteer Opportunities

There are so many ways to help Greenroads!

Looking for a way to help Greenroads? We have many opportunities to get involved that are suited to your personal and professional interests.

Volunteers play an important role in supporting our mission to benefit communities and the environment by recognizing sustainable transportation projects and by promoting sustainability education for transportation infrastructure.

Greenroads, a 501c3 charitable organization, uses Track It Forward to manage volunteer resources and events with volunteer staff.

Why Volunteer?

Happy smiling STPs and Project Managers, doing their CM activities.

  • Be a Greenroads Planeteer. Volunteers are a major, super special part of our human resources capacity and staff development programs internationally (if you want to work here, starting as a volunteer is a great way to get to know us and show your stuff). As a volunteeer, you are an official Greenroads Kool-aid distributor. [Yes, it's a thing.]
  • Be Helpful. We assign volunteer activities to tasks that don't take much of your time, our time, or require a lot of experience or specific training to complete in a reasonable amount of time. These tasks are critical to the organization but not regular enough for a staff position and not boring enough to automate. Nobody wants to volunteer for something that doesn't feel like its helping anything, right?
  • Do Ordinary Things You Are Good At. You can think of volunteer tasks as easy ways to be helpful on a weekend or so a year or while you are at work or doing your normal everyday things. We try to fit tasks to individuals.
  • Learn Something New. Of course, if you want to volunteer in order to learn something new, we are all for it and will support you. We provide volunteer training for all activities. Volunteer training, if you need specific help, can be scheduled on Fridays via our Doodle scheduler: www.doodle.com/greenroads.
  • Get Accolades for Volunteer Achievements! We offer special recognition and gifts to our volunteers for going above and beyond. It's kind of our thing to measure performance, so just like projects and memberships, you can be a Bronze, Silver, Gold and Evergreen volunteer. We set aside special time to make sure your efforts at making a difference for Greenroads are acknowledged.

Volunteer Activity Options

Many people ask us how they can help. The tasks below are the ones listed in Track It Forward as well as an estimated time for each task.

Activity Description Annual Hours
Board Committee Are you a Board Member logging your assigned committee tasks? Do you want to help the Board with theirs? 40
Local Advocacy Have you told your City Council and congressperson about Greenroads? How about developing that Greenroads model policy for your agency? Got some good local examples of sustainable practice? Yeah, that's alllll you. 4
Partner Liaison Are you already part of one of the hundreds of trade associations? You probably barely have time for this green hullabullo and you have so many letters after your name you can spell; APPLE, STEEPLE, EGGPLANT, CADELLES, or EMPALED, right? You might be a good partner liaison to help us connect with your local chapter activities. Bonus: probably jointly get your credential maintenance done at the same time! 8
Project Champion Project Champion. Are you leading a Greenroads Project? Did you help win this one? Easy peasy. Log your project time. Not leading a project yet? Present to your clients and staff about getting started. 20
Project Associate Are you working on a Greenroads project yet? Easy peasy. Log your project time and get yourself some STP points on the Project. 40
Chapter Leadership Want to start a chapter or join the chapter steering committee? Great! You're awesome! 40
Event Coordinator Are you the planning type? Do you like connecting people to place? We need you to help with national, international and local event coordination, especially around about 3 months ahead of April 16-24 for our annual Earth Week event in Seattle. 40
Event Volunteer Like being a part of something, doing a shift, meeting people, attending for free, and getting Greenroads shwag? This is for you. We need help the weeks of April 16-24 for our annual Earth Week event in Seattle. 8
Educational Outreach Give a conference presentation or technical paper about your work with Greenroads or present something related to your Greenroads work or interests to local students of all ages. That's right, try to get kids and your peers excited about roads. They are fun! (Good luck!) 8
Database Maintenance Are you seeing doubles and triples of the same thing? We are, and you can help us keep our database fresh and clean for projects and people. Want to help us move our paper project data online for analytics? We need you. 16
Local Communications & Publicity Work with our Communications Team to tell local sustainability stories and spread the word. 4
Office Help Work with the staff to organize files, water the plants, ship things, put receipts in books and boxes, help with mailings, etc. 8
Publications & Website Help If you are a good writer, we want your help editing and reviewing publications. If you know HTML, we want your help editing and routinely reviewing the website for content and usability. 20
Social Media Content Are you a maven? We want your shares and connections. 4
Subject Matter Experts Join our call list of technical experts that help support the Project Rating Program through the Technical Committee of the Board of Directors, or directly provide your comments on our Publications. We are also looking for bilingual volunteers specifically in many languages. 2
Academic Research Academic Research. For students enrolled in graduate programs or independent study. We won't tell if you won't :)
Data Analytics Can you slice and dice numbers and find patterns? Requires more training to be completed. Best for students enrolled in graduate study and big nerds. Case dependent.
Volunteer Management Leadership roles within the organization for managing teams of volunteers, locally, nationally, or internationally to complete specific tasks and support the Board of Directors. 80
Fundraising Are you good at asking people for money until you get it? Hey, every little bit helps. Any time you can give to providing financial support, including your own support to help us get it, helps us get closer to that next mile. 2

 

How Much Time Are We Talking?

The upfront investment of time required in addition to any of the below volunteer tasks is 1 hour for an orientation webinar + 1 hour of a personal phone call to go over your volunteer assignment. We hold Greenroads program orientation webinars 2x a month for free (usually on Thursdays), and you can schedule your task training on the phone, chat or Skype at www.doodle.com/greenroads. Mondays and Fridays are for private volunteer training. For more detailed tasks, please set aside time on Fridays, and feel free to visit the office to work in person if you can.

How Do I Keep Track of My Volunteer Time?

If you are a volunteer for Greenroads, it is easiest for us if you will track your time using our selected tool (and yes, there's an app for that on Android and iOS). However, we recognize that many companies require their own reporting, so if you would prefer, you can send us your company's confirmed report of your time directy to your Volunteer Manager via email, and we will record it in our system for you.

You can also use our tool for your company's reporting, in some cases, especially if you have a matching program or are paid for your volunteer time. You can print out your account records and track your achievements and your credential maintenance hours. We are happy to provide verification of your volunteer records if you need an official one, just let us know.

  • If your company pays you for your volunteer time, we want to know so we can say thank you.
  • If your company matches your donation of time with cash, please let us know how we can register for this program.
  • If your company matches your cash donations with cash, please help us sign up for this program. Our charity number is 27-3424584.

Sign Up

Interested in joining us?  Please fill out our Volunteer Application Form.  We'd love to hear from you!