Toxic Free NC, a local Raleigh nonprofit dedicated to pesticide awareness, is looking for volunteers this fall to fill its Sustainable Pest Management Intern/Volunteer position.
Sustainable Pest Management Intern/Volunteer
Fall 2011 (dates flexible), with option to continue into Spring 2012
Unpaid, 5 - 10 hours per week
Location: Work from your home or from our downtown Raleigh office
Project Description: Toxic Free NC's collaborators and supporters have relied on us for decades to provide evidence-based advice on least-toxic pest management that is easy for people to understand and use in their homes, schools and child care centers. (Check out our online resources!) Now, with the growing popularity of organic community and school gardens, the same people are coming back to us and wondering, what can be done to manage pests in the garden sustainably? Gardeners need the same kind of well-researched, yet easy-to-use information we offer for structural pests, and they need it in both English and in Spanish. While much advice already exists for NC gardeners through Cooperative Extension or Master Gardeners' programs, it's not always organic, and none of it is in Spanish. Meanwhile, advice for organic gardening exists elsewhere in English and in Spanish, but it's not specific to the climate and pest pressures we have here in North Carolina.
The Sustainable Pest Management Intern/Volunteer(s) will assist our staff in researching, compiling, and producing a new set of tip sheets on organic vegetable gardening. These tip sheets will be useful for anyone in NC who wants to garden organically, but will be especially geared for the particular needs of community and school gardeners, and low-income people gardening to overcome food insecurity. To meet the needs of these particular groups, we'll focus on pest management advice that is not only least-toxic, but also least-complicated, least-expensive, involving the least amount of special or hard-to-find supplies, and least likely for a child to get into and mess with! We'll gather information from print and online sources, from local college programs focusing on sustainable agriculture, and from organic farmers in our community whose farm-scale knowledge we can scale down for gardeners. We'll use all this great information to create a set of tip sheets on different garden crops and pests, we'll translate the new tip sheets into Spanish, and finally we'll distribute both sets widely for use by gardeners all around the state!
Qualifications: Must be a vegetable gardener or farmer committed to organic and sustainable principles, and with excellent research and writing skills. Strong preference will be given to students or graduates of a sustainable agriculture program. Other skills or interest areas that would be helpful, but not necessary: Spanish language for translation; graphic design, photography, cartooning or technical drawing for adding visual appeal to the new tip sheets; Dreamweaver skills for posting the new tip sheets online; previous experience working
with children or with low-income people.
More information is available on the ToxicFreeNC website: http://www.toxicfreenc.org/involved/volunteer.html#spm
Submitted By:
Name: Carter Robinson
Email: info@toxicfreenc.org
