December 2025
By Kat Resanovich, Volunteer Coordinator & Educator
Thank you to all of the amazing volunteers who were a part of the volunteer community in 2025! It has been an amazing year for volunteering at Baltimore Woods. This year we had over 300 individual volunteers that came to our preserve to donate their time, skills, and knowledge to help hundreds of people to connect to nature with us. Without volunteers, we would have been unable to put on all our programs, maintain our preserve, host community events, and so much more! Baltimore Woods truly runs on volunteer steam! The past couple of years, our volunteers have had an annual goal of doing over 10,000 hours of work, and they have come close the last couple of years. This year, thanks to a lot of hard work, we are thrilled to announce that our incredible community of volunteers surpassed that goal, completing 12,614.8 hours of work in 2025! Thank you to the many volunteers who worked hard to make this goal a reality!
We are lucky to have volunteers who come to spend their time with us almost every week, like our A-Team stewardship volunteers that spend every Wednesday protecting our preserve, and our front desk volunteers that welcome you to the interpretive center each time you visit. We have some volunteers who may not make it to the preserve every week, but put in a lot of hard work throughout the year, like our board of directors, summer camp Teen Volunteers, volunteers that help at special events, and Stewardship Workday participants. During summer camp alone, our teen volunteers put in 2,310 hours over 8 weeks to make an unforgettable summer for over 800 campers. Our volunteers that help out with special events are what make our community events possible. From Fairy Fest to Earth Day, volunteers ran hands-on stations and activities, dressed up to become magical creatures, directed traffic, and much more. This year when the parking lot at Sycamore Hill Gardens got rained out and we had to make a last minute switch to busing people from the school to the gardens, a dozen of event volunteers stepped in to help us call ticket holders to explain the new switch to them and make sure that people could still get to the event. It turned out to be a wonderful and beautiful day thanks to all of our amazing volunteers!
In addition to our individual volunteers, we are so thankful for all the community organizations that partnered with us this year to put on group workdays, including Scout groups, local schools and churches, companies like Key Bank, and more! These workdays allow us to accomplish big projects, like when Baxter came in the Spring to help us add steps to our pond area.
We could not do it all without our incredible volunteer community this year. Whether you volunteered with us once or 50 times this year, we appreciate you and all of your hard work. Thank you to all of our volunteers. We are so excited to see our volunteer community growing and we cannot wait for new opportunities to get involved with us in 2026!