Meet Our Members - An Interview Series
Kathryn Wall has been a member of NCAVA for over five years now and also serves as a member of TRIAVA, one of our wonderful NCAVA affiliates! She originally joined NCAVA as a way to get involved, learn more about volunteer administration, and network, but now serves as the NCAVA board webmaster.
Kathryn is the Membership & Volunteer Manager with the JC Raulston Arboretum at NC State University, where she works as a part of a fairly small staff and is always taking on new roles. On top of managing membership and volunteer activities, Kathryn can be most recently found working with the arboretum’s social media/marketing, visitor services, rentals, and large events teams. The most unique part of her job is working with their online and in person plant sales and plant auctions.
Kathryn recently provided us with more information about her NCAVA story, which we are excited to share with you all:
Q: What inspired you to begin working with volunteers?
A: I've been involved with many volunteer activities myself, and coordinated volunteers as part of those positions.
Q: What is an exciting project that you are currently working on?
A: Recently, I have been working on an internal volunteer website that will not only address people who are interested in becoming volunteers, but will give information and share recognition for current volunteers. We also have a lot of citizen science projects coming up, so I’m excited to get more people involved in capturing data to help with larger scientific research.
Q: What would you say is your biggest accomplishment in your career thus far?
A: Getting my NCAVA Volunteer Certification is a personal goal I finally achieved in 2021. On the job, I felt very satisfied when our huge public event "Moonlight in the Garden" was a success, due in large part to all the volunteers who contributed to putting on such a demanding event. This event was really popular, selling out many nights and was a huge fundraiser.
Q: What advice would you give to other volunteer managers, especially those beginning their career?
A: Network and get to know others in your field. NCAVA members are interesting people and you can often "crowdsource" how someone else has handled a situation. This has been very helpful to me.
The JC Raulston Arboretum is part of NC State University in Raleigh, NC. They are a free garden and home to over 7,000 different taxa of plants.To connect with Kathryn about any topics mentioned in this interview, please email her at kbwall@ncsu.edu.