The North Carolina Zoo has passed one million hours of donated volunteer service since its volunteer program started in the late 1970s. The milestone represents decades of work by thousands of people, and it is worth pausing on what a million hours actually buys.
What a million hours is
Volunteers at the Asheboro zoo greet guests, guide educational experiences and work across nearly every part of operations. The contributors include individuals, families, interns, corporate partners and community groups.
“These passionate individuals generously share their time, talents, and expertise in support of the Zoo’s mission to save wildlife and wild places,” said interim zoo director Diane Villa. “They’ve also helped make the Zoo the welcoming, engaging destination it is today. This milestone reflects the spirit of community emblematic of our iconic state zoo.”
Why this is not a soft story
Volunteer hours are easy to file under public relations, and that undersells them. The North Carolina Zoo is a division of the state’s Department of Natural and Cultural Resources, a public institution operating on a public budget, and volunteer labor is a substantial part of how a zoo of that size delivers what it delivers.
It also compounds. A volunteer who has been guiding school groups for fifteen years is not interchangeable with a new one; they know the collection, the routes, the questions children actually ask. A million hours accumulated over almost fifty years represents a very large amount of institutional knowledge that never appears on a payroll.
Volunteer and education programs rarely make the news but carry a lot of a zoo’s weight; The Living Desert put $162,000 into student scholarships this year.
Visiting
The North Carolina Zoo in Asheboro is the largest natural-habitat zoo in the world by area, which means a visit is a genuine walk rather than a loop. If somebody in a volunteer badge offers to tell you about an animal, take them up on it. There is a reasonable chance they have been doing it longer than the animal has been there.
