Volunteer
At Ojai Raptor Center, volunteers are the backbone of our organization and are essential to our ability to care for and protect vulnerable wildlife through rehabilitation, scientific discoveries, and education. We are currently seeking volunteers and need your help!
Volunteering can take many forms. At this time Ojai Raptor Center is seeking regular volunteers to help with our education programs, animal care, and wildlife transport.
We also need volunteers to help with weekend projects, photography and videography, grant-writing, fundraising, event planning, data entry, landscaping, outreach, carpentry, administrative work, graphic design, marketing, and more.
Finding a good fit to help our animals is important for both you and our patients! We ask that all potential volunteers read through our descriptions and guidelines carefully.
All volunteers must be 18 years or older and be vaccinated against Covid-19.
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Assisting the education team involves helping with food preparation for the ambassadors, cleaning ambassadors’ enclosures and furniture, creating enrichment for the ambassadors, and assisting with various projects for the education program. Assistants to the education team will have the opportunity to learn about avian behavior and choice-based, or empowerment training, raptor ecology and husbandry, as well as environmental education.
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Most animal care volunteering is custodial work such as cleaning cages, mews and flights, doing laundry, washing dishes, and general upkeep around the center. Additionally, it includes handling the food that we feed our patients, which is a variety of different meats and prey animals.
We require that animal care volunteers be available for at least one 4 hour shift per week for a period of 4 months.
Volunteers should know that this is laborious and dirty work, but with time and dedication, it can be extremely rewarding!
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For those who cannot commit to daily volunteering but have some free time they'd like to donate to ORC, transporting is a great option.
Transport volunteers are responsible for picking up injured birds from members of the public who have reported an injured bird. In most cases, the bird will be in a container such as a box or crate, to keep it safe and quiet, and the transporter simply picks up the container and brings it to our center.
If you have a car and live in the Ojai, Ventura, Santa Barbara, Carpinteria, Simi Valley, Oxnard, or Thousand Oaks area, you can become an ORC transporter.
All training is provided through ORC; certain transporters will also be trained to capture birds that are not yet contained (this is rare).
Once you are trained, you'll sign up on our online calendar and put in the days and times you are free to transport and we'll call you if a case comes up. It's a great way to volunteer and very important to how the center works with the public.
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Volunteers with experience are needed in many areas: weekend projects, education, grant-writing, fundraising, event planning, data entry, landscaping, outreach, carpentry, administrative work, graphic design, baking for our open houses and people to help us with activities for kids.
If you have a skill or knowledge in another particular field that you think might be useful to the Ojai Raptor Center, please let us know; we would love to hear about it!
Taking on new volunteers, training, and relying on volunteers takes time and energy from our staff. Please apply only if you can make a solid commitment.
If you are interested in volunteering please fill out the ORC Volunteer Application form below.