Volunteer

What can I do?

The Grove City Area Historical Society and Museum welcomes your assistance in many areas. Our volunteers can donate one hour a month or as many hours as they can spare.  Often, our helpers give us one afternoon from 12-3 Tue through Saturday or 6-8 Monday evening , but we are grateful for all service. Volunteers work in teams of at least two people on any given day so you always have a buddy in the building with you.

Opportunities can include you choosing to help with one of 4 collections, one of 12 committees, or any of the many housekeeping tasks that keep the facility open and operational.

Working on one of the four collections means that another volunteer will train you in the specific need of that collection.  The Ketler Collection includes books, photographs, paintings, photo albums, and correspondence spanning more than 120 years, from 1839 to the 1960’s, of two principal families, the Ketlers and the Gilsons and their involvement in the creation of Grove City College. Specifically, a volunteer on this project will learn to process, digitize, and catalogue the collection.  Right now we are fortunate to have Grove City College student volunteers working with us on this project.

  The second collection, our Art Collection involves photographing and cataloging the many art works we have at the Society. The goal of this project is to produce and keep updated a biographical booklet of the art works we have in our collection. Anyone interested in web page design and maintenance or media communication might volunteer to work with the collection of seminar videos we’ve amassed over the years so we can make them available via our webpage of Facebook page.  Finally, we have volunteers who are working diligently on 55 boxes of photographs and negatives we acquired from the family of Carl Giesmann, a Grove City photographer.  The collection, a priceless snapshot of people in our community, needs volunteers to transfer its contents into new acid-free sleeves and acid-free storage boxes.

One of the Board members reminds us often of her Grandmother’s saying, “Many hands make light work.”  We’ve all heard that, and at the Society it translates to dusting, upkeep of theme rooms, cutting out and filing articles, and many other simple tasks we value people doing in a spare afternoon.  As volunteers get to know other volunteers, they often migrate to help with any one of 12 committees that keep the Society operational.  Some work at finding us new members.  Some work at keeping the building facility up and running safely.  Remember, someone has to change the light bulbs, etc.   Some like to work with the activities like our picnic, volunteer luncheon, Christmas Open House.  Some like to work with the team that sets up our display windows.  Some prefer to lend their talents to assisting with our newsletter, our website, our Speaker Series, or getting press releases to local newspapers. Still others have an interest in helping people with genealogy research or cataloging and placing the artifacts as they come into the society.  And there is so much more…

Have we mentioned some kind of ‘work’ that your hands can make light?  If so, contact us and let us welcome you to the team.

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