Make a Difference Day 2021

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Waimea Valley is hosting our annual Make A Difference Day volunteer event and we want to invite you to celebrate this national day of service with us! We will have fun volunteering opportunities for participants of all ages and abilities. volunteers can earn free admission to the valley and entry into a raffle with some awesome prizes. It is sure to be a great day of giving back, and we would love to have you and your 'Ohana join us in helping to make sure that this Valley thrives for generations. The event is divided into two sessions to allow for greater social distancing and smaller group sizes while maintaining a big impact on the valley. The Schedule will look like this: Morning session- * 9:00am, Meet, check-in and get ready for the day * 9:15am, Connect with cultural department for a quick overview of the significance of this valley and the opening ceremony protocol * 9:30am we will begin the volunteering work. We have projects for all ages and abilities. The work will last for 2 hours. * 11:30am we will break for lunch, volunteers free to enter the valley and visit with the community organizations. Afternoon Session- * 12:00pm, Meet, check-in and get ready for the afternoon * 12:15pm, Connect with cultural department for a quick overview of the significance of this valley and the opening ceremony protocol * 12:30pm we will begin the volunteering work. We have projects for all ages and abilities. The work will last for 2 hours. * 2:30pm Afternoon work is done, volunteers free to enter the valley and visit with the community organizations. We will be giving every volunteer an entry for our raffle. Remember that to get a raffle ticket, you must have signed in and filled a waiver that morning and filled a raffle card. We will hold the raffle as an online event a couple of days later and give away some great prizes for the volunteers including a 1-year pass to the valley. We ask that everyone who is interested please RSVP so that we can plan an awesome day for you and your families. To keep in line with the state guidelines, there are a few rules and systems in place for the volunteer events. The rules include things like maintaining social distancing, wearing masks in the visitors center and all indoor areas, proper sanitizing, and limiting group size. We follow these to protect everyone who visits or works here. We want to do our part to keep the case load in Hawaii low and keep our loved ones safe. Due to the major statewide spike in cases of the delta variant, we have introduced a new volunteer requirement effective as of October 1st 2021. We now require all participants 12 and older who will be volunteering at Waimea (both as individuals and in groups) to show either a negative Covid test from the past 48 hours or proof of vaccination. We are doing this to work with the Oahu Safe Access program (details here: Safe Access Oahu). The documentation will need to be shown to me on the day of the event and I will check off each person. There is an exception for participants under 12 years of age, but no other exceptions can be made. I apologize for any inconvenience this might cause, but it is all part of the efforts being made by our management to reduce the risks faced by our staff, visitors, volunteers and local community, so we truly appreciate you doing your part to support this system. We will be sure to inform participants of any further changes and make sure that these rules are simple and relatively easy to follow. Mahalo.

This will help us to get some much needed work done around the valley including cleaning up trash and removing invasive weeds from our botanical collections and it will help us to connect volunteers with other community organizations.