Opportunity Details

At KBOO, we have a dynamic community of 500 volunteers doing everything from front desk work, janitorial work, community reporting, hosting information booths, clerical support, news writing, documentary making, engineering live music, operating sound boards, engineering and computer help, website upkeep, and many, many other things.

Learn about how to take your first steps into the wide world of KBOO volunteerism by attending our general orientation! No need to RSVP, but please contact Ani Haines if you have any questions: volunteer@kboo.org.

Available Shifts

Shift Name	Signup Max	Start	End
General	no limit	n/a	n/a

Opportunity Details

Open Doors tackles food insecurity in Burlington through free community programming.
Open Doors has a Community Supper and Seniors Lunch that provide over 10,000 meals a year.
Open Doors serves 450 families a month and provides 7 days of food each visit to the Community Market. Our Community Garden produces food to support both the meals and market during the growing season and boasts a living fence for access to fresh food at all times.
Community kitchens operate year round at Open Doors, with a special "What's for Dinner?" program to share food literacy skills and build new skills in reducing food waste.

All volunteers are supported and trained in good food handling skills and must comply with Public Health and Safety regulations.

Opportunity Details

Capture images and videos of Atlantic Forest fauna and flora for use in eBooks, documentaries, education programs and ethology studies. You can join our biologists and photographers on active search expeditions as well as analyze footage from the OBBIO camera network. Moreover, individuals with editing, producing and directing skills can support in the production of videos and documentaries.

The Observatory for Biodiversity (OBBIO) - is a network of video cameras that record the fauna and flora 24 hours a day, generating films and content for use in research and education. The dream is to make wildlife monitoring accessible to everyone by placing it online allowing with anyone interest to participate in conservation efforts. Moreover, if the model works and other NGO, National Parks and Research Institutes use the same technology they can link their networks to transfer images, videos and knowledge seemlessly. Therefore OBBIO also seeks to establish partnerships with individuals, businesses and institutions wishing to conduct online monitoring of fauna and flora in other regions of the country. Our videos have been used on the Discovery Channel and are regularly published on our YouTube channel. People interested in adding content to the database or can put the content to good use in clips, documentaries or magizine publications are welcome. Anyone with editing or digital ar skills would be of great help also.

Opportunity Details

Volunteers can help with raising international awareness about the Institute and developing our communications by:
1) Improving the website - web design, additional content, website translations 2) Social media - targeted messaging, blogs, facebook posts 3) Creating videos - to recuit volunteers, display our infrastructure and inform people about our work 4) Attempting to attract more volunteers by posting adverts, like this one, on various volunteer websites 5) Contacting universities to organize courses or set up agreements to develop our internship program 6) Promoting and marketing our Ebooks on biodiversity and wildlife 7) Developing and implementing strategies to increase funds by partnering with institutions, companies and other NGO´s 8) Helping us acquire donated equipment such as audio recording equipment that can help develop our research projects 9) Write grants 10) Find new ways to secure the financial sustainability of our organization

Ensuring the long-term financial sustainability of the NGO is critical to the longevity of existing programs and can allow us to develop new projects.

Opportunity Details

Our gardener, Rafael, always needs help maintaining the grounds, trails, animal enclosures, vegetable patch and microclimate greenhouse so if you are interested in getting your hands dirty then we always have a job for you.

- Trails: we have a couple of trails around the reserve which will need to maintained for visits. Grabbing a machete, you will cut back any plants that are intrusively in the way or are prickly.

- Animal Enclosures: we have a turtle tank and an aquarium which we will need help cleaning, fixing or expanding.

- The Grounds: the reserve is 60 hectares so we need to ensure it is in good condition and looks presentable to the general public who visits.

- The Microclimate Greenhouse: we have a greenhouse which has various frogs living in it. Help maintaining the infrastructure and the plants with the greenhouse would be great.

- Vegetable and Herb Patch: we want to expand the patch so we can produce our own food for our staff and volunteers. Setting up infrastructure is essential as we also want this area to be a place where people can sit on benches or do picnics. Planting and watering will also be required and any experience with organic farming would be great as all our produce uses zero pestacides.

Opportunity Details

IPBio offers various research assistant roles that cover a wide range of topics but are all related studying the biology of fauna and flora. Below are some example of research areas we offer:

- Frog Biodiversity: IPBio wishes to understand the distribution of amphibians, understand their reproductive habits, track species composition and well-being as well as potential find new species. IPBio has 6 different sites each with 5 pitfalls. Volunteers will need to open the pitfalls for 48 hours and visit the sites to collect data such as species, photograph, size, any diseases found or other relevant information for statistical analysis. There is also active nocturnal search that can be conducted on the reserve.

- Mammal Monitoring: IPBio uses two methods to capture images of mammals for research, namely OBBIO and bushnell camera traps. OBBio is a network of video cameras that record the fauna and flora 24 hours a day. We also have 3 bushnell camera traps which film in full HD. This footage is used for eBooks, documentaries, research and to produce educational material. The volunteer is responsible for setting up the cameras and placing bait in order to attract a variety of different species and ensure that each site is cleared of obstacles, such as a branches, so that our we capture quality videos of the animals in action. The volunteer then looks at the footage and notes down the time and species (as well as any further details required) at the monitoring station. The videos will then be saved onto the image bank and sorted by group with the appropriate titles in the following format: “Group; scientific name; popular name; notes (such as nest); name of photographer; institute name; date”. Depending on the length of stay, the volunteer can develop a research focus and analyze the data as well.

- Botanical Research: IPBio wishes to create a digital herbarium on our website of Atlantic Forest flora. Moreover, we wish to add descriptions with important scientific information, such as germination periods, so the volunteer will need to perform tests in the lab.

- Independent Research: Volunteers can decide their own focus of study, however, IPBio has the right to reject research proposals. The volunteer must submit a research plan prior to arrival at IPBio.

Opportunity Details

IPBio recently won the Wildlife Acoustics Scientific Product Grant and was donated bioacoustics hardware and software. The objective is to record species behavior, understand their distribution, habitat use and peak periods of activity. Moreover, we can combine the footage captured by our project "OBBIO-Observatory for Biodiversity" with high quality sound, which would allow us to construct a "sound bank" that can be used to, for example, compare the differences in sound between species and between individuals of the same species. By registering scientific data, we can analyze species well-being and use the data to take action as well as provide recommendations for conservation efforts of endangered Atlantic Forest species. We are looking for a volunteer who can lead this project which means setting up the bioacoustics hardware to collect data and analyzing the data recovered. We need someone who is IT savvy to work with the complex software (Song Scope).

Opportunity Details

Recently we conducted a tree inventory of one of the IPBio trails (642 meters) which is located in an area of the reserve which consists of highly anthropized secondary forest. This inventory found 22 species from 15 distinct families. Moreover, we collected information on morphological characteristics, occurrence, wood, utility, ecological information, phenology, seeds description and seedling production for each species.We would like to expand this project to our various other trails and areas of the reserve (which vary in stage of ecological succession and other differeniating factors) to get a complete inventory of trees on our reserve. Additionally, we would like to use this paper as the basis for monitoring the growth and well-being of the reserves forest.

For more information on the project, we can send the research plan and final paper.

Opportunity Details

Overview: IPBio is looking for a long-term volunteers (minimum 3 month stay but preferably 6 months) who would focus on testing and developing a protocol of how to grow bioluminescent mushrooms in the lab under controlled conditions. In addition volunteers will participate in: searching for new species of bioluminescent mushrooms in the forest; photographing the mushrooms as well as helping us develop an e-book on "Mushrooms on the Atlantic Forest".

Context: Bioluminescent mushrooms are only abundant during the summer when the humid conditions are favorable to their development. IPBio wishes to develop a protocol which allows us to grow them in the lab under controlled conditions so they are readily available all year long. This would allow: researchers to study them over longer periods; students on school trips to visualize the mushrooms during their winter trips (when they do not grow naturally) and potentially have an impact on tourism in Iporanga.

Opportunity Details

We need your help to restore our facilities and make them the best they can be.
We need help taking care of the animals participating in training opportunities, restoring our recreational facilities, expanding our building and with your help we can do it. Let us know when you are available and what you like to do and I am sure we will have something that suits your desires to help