"This is not a flirtation. This is a real commitment for volunteers," says Charlene James-Duguid, manager of the Smithsonian Research Expeditions Program. As an anthropologist, she is professionally trained to analyze others' motives. "What does it mean to be a volunteer?" she asked. "I don't look upon volunteers as being paying participants - that does nothing for me. It's not a matter of dollars and cents. It's something very special. And it's not a temporary, onetime thing. Many of our participants help on project after project." James-Duguid's respect for volunteers creates a family atmosphere that encourages them to stay in touch after the project is over.
The Smithsonian Research Expeditions Program draws on its considerable resources at the Smithsonian Institution which include scientists conducting field work all over the world as well as its archives. Volunteers, for example, can help catalog some of their enormous collections, such as animal bones dug up in the course of archaeological projects. The program also uses volunteers to take part in activities in Washington, D.C. where the Smithsonian is located, documenting in photographs such things as the activities at the Vietnam Memorial on Memorial Day or the annual Festival of American Folklife. Volunteer photographs do not have to be professional to be valuable on this projects, which is designed, "for an audience that is not yet born."
James-Duguid's particular interest is working-class America and the small things that give each community its unique stamp. She says that the Expeditions Program will always offer what she calls "the rough ones" -expeditions in the outback, such as studying birds in the Yucatan or recording the activity of a Costa Rican volcano. But her particular interest is in capturing that part of the United States that is often forgotten in funding, for example, the small historical museums or a small town's public monuments. "I'd like to find projects that relate to people and work, the working class, and times in our history that may not get recognition or acknowledgment," she says. Projects on the drawing board include cataloging the collections of Finnish immigrant diaries and possibly the black cowboy museum in Denver; and James-Duguid is working with other government agencies to do a project on the Civilian Conservation Corps camps, one of the work corps developed during the Depression, and a survey of some of the "temporary" buildings erected during World War II.
The baby of MMOs, begun in 1988 with five teams, the Smithsonian Research Expeditions Programs will level off at about twenty-five teams a year. For James-Duguid, who is herself a scientist who has lead several teams to study and document Crow Fair in Montana and Lumberjack Days in Idaho, weaving the volunteer into the fabric of research is the real goal. Her office is filled with research data collected by volunteers, and she feels a personal responsibility to keep them informed. "Following through to the end is very important to me," she says.
The Smithsonian Research Expeditions Program is a two-person office operating next door to the Smithsonian Administrative Offices. The Smithsonian offers scholarships for students and teachers, with special preference for members of minority groups. It will give a full refund if it is notified of cancellation 45 days before the project; after that, it will withhold the initial $300. No refunds will be made 10 or fewer working days before the project. Full refund will be made if you cannot be accommodated on an expedition or if it is canceled."
This excerpt was taken from:
Ocko, Stephanie. Environmental Vacations: Volunteer Projects to Save the Planet. Santa Fe, New Mexico: John Muir Publications, 1992. 58-60.
