As we navigate through the changes and challenges COVID-19 has presented, we have been working closely with park staff to understand the needs of parks and how we can continue to support them through volunteerism.  

We worked with our team of field consultants and core leaders to carefully craft safety protocols, and procedures to implement at 6 “pilot workdays.” These events helped test-run these best practices for volunteering in the time of COVID-19. We hosted 5 workdays in the month of July, and  one workday in August at the following parks:

• Rio De Los Angeles State Park   

• Folsom Lake State Recreation Area   

• Trinidad State Beach  

• Fort Ord Dunes State Park  

• Garrapata State Beach    

• Los Angeles State Historic Park  

At these workdays we took safety precautions such as, physical distancing, wearing masks and gloves, and providing hand sanitizer. We also decreased the size of our volunteer groups, as well as the length of the workdays. All these precautions proved to contribute to the success of our pilot workdays. A total of 57 volunteers at 6 parks were able to remove invasive plant species, pick up and remove trash after the July 4th holiday, help with trail maintenance, as well as provide some much needed time outdoors together (but distanced) for our dedicated volunteers.  

Thank you to everyone who helped us with our pilot workdays, and thank you CLIF Bar for donating snacks for our volunteers. Because of the success of these physically distant events we will be launching small scale workdays at select sites in the coming months. We will continue to monitor risks related to COVID-19, keep in touch with and support our parks. For updates on our volunteer program please check our volunteer page on our website.