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Volunteers who lend their hands, knowledge, skills, curiosity, and enthusiasm are essential to helping Tillers function. Share your skills with other community, service, and agriculturally oriented people, whatever your specialty. Pick from any of these volunteer opportunities or contact Tillers for more information.
Each year in September, Tillers hosts Fair Food Matters' Southwest Michigan Community Harvest Fest. Tillers welcomes members of the local community to explore our facilties and participate in the local food, environmental, and artistic communities. Avera ging 1,500 to 2,000 guests, setting up and taking down event facilities is especially labor-intensive. From setting up and taking down vendor tables and chairs, to staffing hay rides, to pressing and cooking sorghum for molasses, to parking cars, to the joy of trash pick-up, volunteer labor is especially appreciated at this busy time. Contact Tillers or Fair Food Matters for more informaiton.
The Tillers Museum and Carroll Abbey Collection
Tillers has recently constructed a new on-site storage building for Tillers Museum and Abbey Collection artifacts. This spring and summer, the immense project of moving the Abbey Collection from its current off-site storage and organizing and cataloging it here at Tillers' Cook's Mill Learning Center commences. Volunteers with strong backs and an interest in historical tools are welcome and appreciated.
Farm Work
With horses, oxen, a beef cattle herd, sheep, goats, chickens, turkeys, and one geriatric donkey to feed, there is always plenty of farm work to be done at Tillers. If you'd like to help with animal care, field work, and especially HAY MAKING, please contact Dulcy at Tillers.
Building Projects
Construction Coordinator Rob Burdick and Shops Coordinator John Sarge are always busy working on various building-related projects, whether it be reconstructing a barn, building museum displays, or installing box stalls and such in the basement of the Springhill Barn. If you have building or carpentry experience and would like to help, please contact Rob at Tillers.
Inwood Work Days
August 27-29 there will be work days at Inwood in Charlevoix. Mark Maier plans to put the roof on the stone walls of the old slaughterhouse and build an addition on the north side to house a team of oxen. The timbers for the structure were cut during the fall 2008 Timber Framing class, so the work will be mostly assembling and erecting the structure and putting the roofs on. If you’d like to volunteer, contact Tillers at (800) 498-2700.
Bulk Mailings
Tillers mails our Nigh Ox newsletter on a quarterly basis, and our class catalog annually. Each of these mailings requires a large amount of labor for folding, taping, and labeling. If you would like to help with this process, please contact Carrie at Tillers. Our next Nigh Ox will be published and mailed in early July.
International Projects
Tillers welcomes skilled volunteers interested in working overseas on international projects. Tillers looks for skills in ox driving and training, teaching, blacksmithing, foreign languages, woodworking, and/or photography in volunteers selected for overseas work, as well as dedication, a sense of adventure, flexibility, and good humor. Depending on specific project terms, volunteers may incur some costs. International volunteering opportunities are subject to project terms and availability and Tillers' discretion.
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