Volunteer Coordinator

The Museum needs a volunteer coordinator to recruit, schedule, motivate, keep the Museum’s growing corps of volunteers informed, and act as a liaison between volunteers and museum management. 

The Museum needs to build around its already dedicated but small core of volunteers to move forward and continue to build and improve the museum.  No specific amount of time is required.

Museum Host

The Museum enters the 2020 summer season trying to keep as many open hours as possible while only having one staff member. Whether the museum will have its paid staff is yet to be seen. As a museum host, you will be providing a valuable role assisting the museum in remaining open for day visitors. For those interested, an orientation and training will take place in mid- to late-May. 

Duties:

• Greet visitors,
• Take admissions,
• Orient visitors to museum options,
• Clerk the gift shop,
• Answer basic questions about museum exhibits
• Protect collections by pleasantly monitoring guest activity.
• Light vacuuming, dusting and cleaning (in down time)
• Answering tourist information questions,
• Answering phones,
• Handling basic archival questions,
• Taking messages for the director regarding museum business,
• Assisting with deliveries.

The length of shifts will be determined at the time of training. Daytime hours.

Overnight In History Program

Our Overnight in History program launches its first season in 2020. Be a part of the excitement and help the Museum become an excellent host. Get a chance to help teach, make memories, and just meet visitors from all over.  This year the museum will be hosting three venues – the Maltby Homestead, the Hegg Oil Workers House, and the Burlington Northern Caboose and will be working on adding a fourth venue – a sheep herders wagon.  In this first season, the Museum doesn’t anticipate bookings more than one to three times per week. This program needs the following types of assistance.

Venue preparers: A venue preparer will prep each historic space for guests according to a checklist, making sure that each space is clean, beds properly prepared, and guest amenities in place. Dirty linens and towels are taken to the museum laundry and washed, dried, and put away.  The restroom/shower room for guests will be cleaned and stocked.  Scheduling depends on guest bookings, number of meal hosts, and volunteer availability.  

If you are detail-oriented and like to clean at the same time as preserving historic structures and knowing that you are an important part of creating a memorable experience for our guests, this is an opportunity for you!

Meal hosts: Each booking comes with a breakfast.  Guests can also purchase a dinner option for the night that they arrive.  Meals will be served in the exhibit area in our Collection Care facility with meals being prepared in a small kitchen.  Our volunteer outreach coordinator will select the menus and gather the supplies.  There will be a range of one to six guests per meal.  Meal hosts will receive a menu and number of guests for their scheduled meal. Upon arriving at the museum, the meal hosts will set up the required table and chairs; set the tables; prepare the meal; meet, greet and visit with guests, and clean up.  Training, including safe food handling procedures, will be provided.

If you love cooking and like to meet and chat with new people and be an ambassador of Glacier County, this is an opportunity for you. Breakfast shifts will require one to three hours in the morning and evening meal shifts are one to two hours in the early evening. Scheduling depends on guest bookings, number of meal hosts, and volunteer availability.

Interpreter: As an interpreter, you will be trained for one, two, or all three venues. You get to choose.  A training manual for each venue plus in-person training will be offered.   As an interpreter, you will meet with your assigned guests in either the homestead, caboose, or oil house for a one- to two-hour interaction with guests.  Scheduling depends on guest bookings, number of meal hosts, and volunteer availability.

For the caboose, you will introduce guests to railroading. In the depot exhibit you will demonstrate the important role the depot played in railroading by demonstrating the telegraph and interlocking plant that controlled train movement across Cut Bank’s railroad trestle as well as explaining the train order system. At the caboose, you will show guests the purposes of a caboose and demonstrate how train crews communicated through lantern and whistle signals.  

If you are a homestead interpreter you will introduce guests to the life of a homesteader and the realities of living in a tiny house on the prairies of Montana. You will have an opportunity to demonstrate a variety of homestead skills from operating a wood stove, making coffee homesteader style, and washing clothes with a rapid washer.  

If you are an interpreter at the Hegg oil worker house, you will be host/hostess for the evening, discussing life in the oil camp of Santa Rita while entertaining guests with light refreshments in the 1930s style with tunes of the period from a radio.

If you love history, like to demonstrate history, and like to meet and talk to new people, this is an opportunity for you.

 Collections

Collections are the foundation of any history museum. The Glacier County Museum has been preserving artifact collections since 1980 from over 2,500 present and past residents of Glacier County. You will be helping preserve Glacier County History for future generations at the same time as learning fascinating aspects about the community which you live. Our collections memorialize those who came before us and their accomplishments in shaping the place we call home. 

In the past few years, in partnership with Glacier County, the Museum has developed a Collections Care Center that most museums in Montana our size do not have.  Since 2016, our Museum has had the privilege of having a Collection Coordinator position to assist the director in caring for the treasures of Glacier County. Since October 1^st our collection coordinator position was eliminated. While we hope to get the position back, when and if is unknown. In the meantime, people still have faith in the museum and still offer important collections.  Routine tasks still have to be done.  

There is a variety of duties to choose from. For those interested in working with the wide variety of collections, the director and other museum volunteers will orient you to collections work, access your skills and interests, try to match you with specific projects, and work with you as you learn new skills.  In certain areas, books and online webinars will assist with training.  One basic skill needed for all tasks:  volunteers must be able to follow directions closely.

Priority projects at this time include:

• Monthly pest control inspections,
• Assisting with sorting and inventorying incoming collections,
• Cleaning collection storage and exhibits areas as well as individual objects,
• Using accepted museum techniques and cleaning products,
• Assisting with boxing and housing artifacts (involves creating supports from cardboard and other materials to safely store objects-great for people liking craft projects),
• Assisting with researching the historical significance of objects or the individuals who owned them (great for people who like solving puzzles),
• Sewing dust covers for objects and sewing labels onto textiles),
• Assisting with maintaining both paper and computer databases.

Groundskeeping/Maintenance

The Glacier County Museum complex contains over ten structures spread over fourteen acres.  In the summer, the grass and weeds grow. The rough Montana climate weathers boardwalks, erodes paint, and creates a number of repair projects. Our living history programs requires a homestead garden, and summer flowers in our planters add color. This summer season, the Museum does not have funding for staff or contractors. Help make the Glacier County Museum a beautiful place to visit.   Those interested in this project will meet, discuss the project, and agree on an implementation plan.

Groundskeeping Team:  This includes weed control, mowing, and trimming.   The museum has a riding mower, push mower, high wheel trimmer, and has gas trimmers.

Gardening Team: This includes prepping, planting, watering, and weeding our flower planters and homestead garden. 

Maintenance Teams: Projects are identified and will be placed in a binder for review in the front entry of the museum. At this time painting projects include various steps, porch rails and doors; portions of the Pioneer building; the tower of the windmill; the flag poles; and finishing Henry’s Miniature farm. Woodworking projects involve the windmill, sheep wagon, board walk repairs, hen house repairs, and improvements to access the P.P. Lee Mercantile Building.  Another project includes washing and degreasing the Burlington Northern Caboose.    

Events/Fundraisers

The museum’s Events Committee works behind the scenes to come up with ideas for events which are educational and entertaining at the same time.  Following our mission, which is to collect, preserve and interpret the history of Glacier County and the surrounding area, we purposefully look for ideas from the current newspapers of 1900 through the recent past.  The museum is also offering the three Overnight in History venues (homestead, oil worker’s house, and caboose) to be rented for birthday parties.

Activities can include, but are not limited to: 

• Assisting with cooking a meal
• Working in the kitchen, dishing up the meal
• Serving the meal to customers
• Host/hostess to participants
• Setting up the event, which often includes decorations
• Cleaning up after an event
• Setting up a venue for a birthday party.
• Cleaning up a venue after a party.

Events to date

Christmas at the Museum: The museum is decorated for Christmas – 1910 general store, 1917 school house, 1935 oil worker’s house, and a 1950s tree in the main museum.  Lunch and a bake sale are in the PP Lee Mercantile/Pioneer Store. Toy trains are set up, toys and games displayed, and Santa actually visits us in his 1950s outfit where kids can get a Polaroid photo taken with him.

Dinner at the Club Café: The Club Café was a popular restaurant in 1920s Cut Bank, located directly across the street from the Pioneer Store.  Therefore, in the PP Lee Mercantile/Pioneer Store, the back can be set up to represent the Club Café.  With 1920s music playing in the background, dinners or brunches, made and served by volunteers, have been popular. 

Games Nights: Games from the past and present were available on certain nights in 2019 for folks to get together and play something they had not played before.  My Mother Sent Me, Touring, Game of Base Ball, Parcheesi, the original Monopoly, and the Game of Life are a few of the games available.

Silent Movies: Charlie Chaplin, Harold Lloyd, and Buster Keaton were all featured in silent films played at our Pioneer Store, set up as a theater.  At Halloween, Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde was shown, followed by a costume contest.  Candy popular between 1910-1930, freshly popped popcorn, bottled pop and water were available for sale.

Music through the Decades: Music mirrors what is happening in the country.  Participants heard a short narrative about the goings-on in history for the decades 1900 through the 1970s, followed by two or three songs from the times.  Ice cream sundaes and shade umbrellas rounded out the experience.