Supercharged Volunteer Stewardship

Poudre Wilderness Volunteers has been actively assisting the Canyon Lakes Ranger District, Arapaho and Roosevelt National Forest and Pawnee Grasslands for nearly 30 years and models robust and successful volunteer recruitment, retention, and engagement. Learn their tricks of the trade from the people doing the heavy lifting behind the scenes. From decisions by the organization's founders to current structure and processes, what has made them successful? What can other organizations learn?

Poudre Wilderness Volunteers is comprised of over 250 individuals who live primarily in northern Colorado and who range in age from 18 to 80 years old. Our volunteers represent nearly every imaginable background and all walks of life. The group consists of retirees as well as people still actively working in such fields as medicine, education, public and private administration and business. The mission of Poudre Wilderness Volunteers is to assist the Canyon Lakes Ranger District of the United States Forest Service in managing and protecting wilderness and backcountry areas within its jurisdiction. To achieve this mission, Poudre Wilderness Volunteers recruits, trains, equips and fields citizen volunteers to serve as wilderness rangers and hosts for the purpose of educating the public, and provides other appropriate support to these wild areas.

Presenters:
Jeanne Corbin is the Chair of Poudre Wilderness Volunteers Board of Directors. She worked 30+ years in the Texas public schools and private practice, primarily as a music therapist, serving a variety of children with special needs and also as a music educator. She and her husband, Mike, moved to Colorado in 2009 upon their retirement. She now keeps busy with family, directing the small choir at Red Feather Lakes Chapel in the Pines and with Poudre Wilderness Volunteers (since 2010).

Mike Corbin currently serves as the Chair of New Recruit Training for Poudre Wilderness Volunteers. Prior to retiring to Colorado, he worked for NASA for 31 years. He and his wife Jane joined PWV in 2010 and Mike worked his first season as a trainer for PWV's new recruits in 2012. He has served as PWV's Board Chair twice.

Hayden Hamby has been with PWV since 2022 and is the current Co-Chair for PWV's Recruiting Committee. Growing up in Oklahoma, hiking opportunities were limited, but after moving to Colorado for school he took to the great outdoors like butter rolling off a hot biscuit (read: with vigor!). He's been fortunate enough to hike much of the Colorado Rockies and also the Pacific Northwest and to see flora and fauna that an Okie could only dream about. Hayden is honored to serve the PWV mission and help preserve and protect wild areas so others can have a similar experience as mine. Outside of PWV, he works for a large organization to create solutions for wildlife disease and damage.