Volunteer Opportunities

Historic Takoma needs You!

As an all-volunteer organization we depend on the community for volunteers to support our efforts to preserve the history for future generations, provide for community gathering, and create and make educational materials available for the public. Volunteering gives you the opportunity to learn more about and connect to your community and its residents as well as make a contribution toward preserving the present for the future.

How can you help?

Historic Takoma’s Archives

We have great needs for help with organizing and managing the physical and digital archives. At present the Historic Takoma building and physical archives are closed due to the COVID19 pandemic restrictions. Once we are able to re-open volunteer opportunities include Managing the Collections, Creating Inventories, Research, Digitizing Materials. Volunteer opportunities in the archives are outlined in Managing HTI’s Archives.

House and Garden Tour

Each year the House and Garden tour, which started in 1973, showcases houses and neighborhoods around the Takoma community. Not only is this a wonderful way to learn more about houses and history – it’s Historic Takoma’s principal fundraising event to support the activities of the organization. After a pandemic hiatus the House and Garden Tour resumes on June 9 from 1 pm – 5 pm. Watch our website for more details. Volunteers are needed for research, for writing, and most importantly to serve as docents at the houses on the tour. If you can help please send a note to ljpearsall00@gmail.com.

Research

The Takoma Houses project provides a community, crowd-sourced means to collect information about the houses of Takoma and the people that have lived in them. Read more at Takoma Houses. And – if you’ve been curious about something in the community and have done some research we’d like to hear about it. Please share your findings by sending a note to Archives@HistoricTakoma.org.

Technology

Do you have social media, websites, digitizing, and other technical skills. We are in need of volunteers that can assist with improving and managing our social media sites, the website, and building our digital repository. We are very interested in having someone with GIS skills work with us to build digital maps of Takoma history. Please contact us at Archives@HistoricTakoma.org

Public Events

From time to time we need help with providing open hours for the archives, providing support to public meetings, staffing our table at the various festivals and street fairs.  Look for announcements in our newsletter or on the home page of the website.