Education & Outreach  -  Senior Volunteer Program

The Senior Volunteer Program assists the Department by providing enhanced public service to the community while offering opportunities for senior citizens to make a definitive contribution toward protecting California's wildlife resources.

Program Vision

We seek to create a Senior Volunteer Program that:

. . . Empowers Senior Volunteers to utilize their talents in a way that brings them satisfaction and makes a worthy contribution towards protecting California's fish and wildlife resources.

. . . Is committed to developing a network of effective relationships with fellow DFG employees and the public based on teamwork and trust; getting better results in relationships by cooperating interdependently rather than by competing independently. Valuing differences in others and seeking the third alternative.

. . .Utilizes conservation principles and ethics based on facts, not feelings.

. . . Promotes to the public and Senior Volunteers, sound conservation habits in Knowledge -understanding what to do and why to do it; Skill -knowing how to do it; and Desire -the motivation for wanting to do it.

. . .Reinforces teaching. The ability for the Senior Volunteers to share their learning with the public; Capture -to understand the basic content or idea; Expand - to analyze and add personal experience/knowledge; and Apply -to live it, while sharing examples of application.

. . .Creates an environment where Senior Volunteers communicate first by seeking to understand then to be understood.

. . .Encourages Attentive Listening -paying attention and focusing on what the speaker says and comparing that to their own experiences and Empathetic Listening Skills -listening and responding with both the heart and mind to understand the speaker's words, intent and feelings. "People don't care how much you know until they know how much you care."

. . .Supports conservation ethics and principles applied in a relationship where problems and opportunities can be addressed synergistically; when two or more organizations produce more together than the sum of what they could have produced separately.

. . .Is the first of it's kind in California and is used as a model to expand to other counties throughout the South Coast Region; San Diego, Orange, Los Angeles, Ventura and Santa Barbara, eventually being adopted as a statewide DFG program.