Volunteering

Volunteering + Employee Engagement + Community Engagement

Want to engage your office, school, or community organization around making a positive environmental impact? Our in-person and virtual programs provide valuable volunteer and learning opportunities for a wide range of communities.

Find out more about any of our programs by getting in touch with us at events@earthdayinitiative.org or 212-922-0048.

 

Check out our broad range of volunteer, employee engagement, and community engagement opportunities below!

 

1 VIRTUAL INTERACTIVE EVENTS AND WEBINARS

Are you in charge of your office’s employee engagement program? Are you an educator? Or are you part of a church, synagogue, or other community organization? Get in touch with us about the broad range of interactive virtual events we can coordinate for your community.

We host interactive discussions with high-profile experts on a range of sustainability topics. 

Themes around which we can focus a virtual session include:

  • Environmental justice

  • Wellness at home and in the workplace

  • Renewable energy

  • Sustainable food

  • Environmentalism and green living tips

  • Youth climate activism

In addition, we're happy to put something together on another specific topic.  We have a huge number of connections in the environmental world so we can pull together an event on any sustainability issue.  Get in touch for details and pricing.

 

2 NEGOTIATON SIMULATION VOLUNTEERING

Our Gotham Grazer program provides leadership opportunities for high school students to engage the broader community in sustainable food conversations, exploring ways to increase the sustainable food resources available and career tracks in the sustainable food industry. 

Our interactive negotiation simulation puts participants in the roles of hypothetical stakeholders in a food desert who come together to figure out solutions to the community's food security and access issues.  We developed the program with colleagues from Harvard Law School as a great team-building exercise that delves into issues around sustainable food while exploring communication skills and negotiation strategies.  Small groups of five people will spend an hour negotiating amongst themselves followed by a 30-minute debrief with the entire group to discuss the negotiation outcomes. 

The event provides a great opportunity for our incredible high school interns to develop their own leadership skills as they facilitate the entire exercise.  This event can include as many participants as you like, broken out into small groups of five people each. Get in touch for details and pricing.

 

3 ROOFTOP FARM VOLUNTEERING (NYC AREA)

We're excited to help one of our partner rooftop farms in Midtown Manhattan get their operations off the ground again after the pandemic.  We're currently looking for groups that might want to join in helping out at the space this coming spring and summer so the rooftop farm can continue to serve the food pantry that operates downstairs. 

A volunteer session can be 2-3 hours and can accommodate up to 30 people. Get in touch for details and pricing.

 

4 SEED-BALL PLANTING VOLUNTEER EVENT (NYC AREA)

Our team can come into your offices to help you create seed balls to green New York City's vacant lots (aka seed bombing or guerrilla gardening) and secure its shorelines. We'll lead your team through an exercise making small balls out of a mixture of seeds, soil, and fertilizer. The balls will then be distributed in vacant lots to green what is otherwise a dirt lot with no vegetation and along shorelines to grow vegetation which protects against erosion. We'll also run through some of the great gardening and farming initiatives in NYC. Get in touch for details and pricing.





To find out more about volunteer opportunities and other community engagement programs, get in touch at events@earthdayinitiative.org or 212-922-0048.

 

Looking for ideas on how to engage on your own this Earth Day? Join us by taking real and impactful action in your own community and office with our Green Living + School/Office Guide this spring.  Gather your colleagues, friends, or family and run through a checklist of things you can do. Free to download!

 

Our virtual programs follow in the wake of our very successful Earth Day 50 virtual events.  The events saw 400K+ live viewers. 

We are able to engage a broad audience by working with a wide range of prominent individuals.  Our Earth Day 2020 and 2021 virtual events included Al Gore, Elizabeth Warren, Bill Nye, Ian Somerhalder, Joseph Gordon-Levitt, Broadway performers from Hamilton and Jagged Little Pill, climate scientists, and prominent environmental activists.

And in recent years we have worked with NYC Mayors Bill de Blasio and Michael Bloomberg, United States Senator Chuck Schumer, and United Nations Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon.

Our partners range from advocacy organizations and educational institutions to media outlets and public officials. We’ve worked with and received support from a wide range of corporate partners over the years.  Multiple partners report that their work with us is regularly their “most successful engagement” of the entire year.