Please let me know as soon as possible about your availability for the following dates in APRIL:
**SHIFTS** **– **
-Saturday, 4/4:
12pm – 3pm and
3pm – 6pm
-Sunday, 4/5:
12pm – 3pm and
3pm – 6pm
-Saturday, 4/11:
12pm – 3pm and
3pm – 6pm
-Sunday, 4/12:
12pm – 3pm and
3pm – 6pm
-Saturday, 4/18:
12pm – 3pm and
3pm – 6pm
-Sunday, 4/19:
12pm – 3pm and
3pm – 6pm
-Saturday, 4/25:
12pm – 3pm and
3pm – 6pm
-Sunday, 4/26:
12pm – 3pm and
3pm – 6pm
**EVENTS** **– **
Friday, April 17: The (13th annual) Panorama Challenge (at the Queens Museum); as many vollies as possible, starting around 5 until around 10.
For those not familiar, the Panorama Challenge is our biggest event of the year. It's basically a geographical/historical trivia challenge based around the panorama. As always, it will be held at the Queens Museum (home of the panorama), in Flushing Meadows Park. This event is a really great (*and* educational) time with a huge crowd, tasty snacks/drinks and even a professional band for a musical interlude—and we would love to have (and need) as many volunteers as possible to help out. It's a big to-do between admissions, concessions, the set up/break down and just handling the crowd, but a whole lot of fun. Definitely worth the experience if you haven't attended one before
Sunday, April 19: Statue of Liberty Book Event. The time for this event is still TBD. More details to come. One volunteer needed.
**NEWS/REMINDERS/MISCELLANEOUS:**
First, we now have sanitizing sprays at the front desk for use on surfaces such as the front door, desk, and bathroom sink area. There is also hand sanitizer at the front desk. In light of the current health issues, we encourage you to use them as much as necessary. Obviously, if you feel any signs of sickness, you should avoid coming in for your shift (and, as with any assigned shift you cannot make, please try to let me know as far in advance as possible). Especially because we often welcome international travelers, we want to make it clear that we are considering all current health concerns and make sure everyone is well aware of our responsibility as a public space.
Secondly, on a positive note, we have gained a few new volunteers in the past month, so thank you to anybody who helped with this cause. However, we can never have too many, so I'm copying my blurb from the last email as a reminder and also for our new volunteers:
In my years managing the volunteer program, (thankfully) I’ve never had to bring this up, but now we’ve unfortunately reached a point where we are getting very low on volunteers. We are not quite at panic level just yet, but we are dangerously close. When active volunteers decided to leave, we always seemed to pick up new ones here and there through our normal channels, but those haven’t been as fruitful as in the past, and the losses have been (many) more than the gains in the last year or so. As some of you know, I struggle to put the schedule together each month and now there is basically no coverage cushion left. I don't want us to reach a point where we are asking too much from of our current crew, where many of us continually go above and beyond already in our time and effort donated. I know nobody here wants us to be closed for even one normal shift, so now I’m directly reaching out to everybody here to see if they have anybody in mind who might be interested in volunteering with us. If so, please send them our way. If anybody can help attract new people to volunteer with us, it's all of you, who can describe first hand how special this place really is. I'm hoping this internal campaign can produce at least a few new volunteers to help stabilize us going forward. We can never have too many volunteers, but for right now, we just need enough to keep our museum running and open for the community to share
Big thanks as always,
Dominick
