Description:
The Foundation has reported to you in the past about our work on a proposal to the New Hanover County Schools to participate in the 3rd Grade Tar Heels Walk program.
The New Hanover County Schools were very receptive to our suggestions and gave us the go ahead at an April meeting to finish the development of a companion program for their 3rd grade classes doing the Tar Heel Walk and convey new and exciting information about downtown history and historic preservation.
The Tar Heel's walking tour brings 3rd graders downtown during the fall semester and early winter for an introduction to the City and some of our institutions.
In order for our partnership to work we will need a minimum of 20 - 25 volunteers willing to go through 4-5 hours of training this summer and then commit to conduct 2-4 tours over the period from the first week of September through the end of January. We will need to cover 45 to 50 tours. The tour lasts from 9:00am - 1:15pm.
Julia Yanetti, our fall UNC-W scholarship recipient, and I have walked the route and recreated the tour and it goes by quickly. Guides will assume no direct supervisory responsibility for the students because they will be accompanied by their teachers and teacher aids as well as parents sometimes.
The tour and our collaboration could be a wonderful opportunity to introduce young people to the history and preservation of downtown (as well as bring their parents into the picture) but it will challenge the Foundation so we need every volunteer we can muster. Please let me know if you are interesting in serving as a tour guide and you feel you can commit to the training and 2-4 tours. I must report back to the school system very soon on whether we have the volunteer guide force. If we get a solid core of volunteers we will move to set up training and start preparing our materials. We will meet with the teachers in August and start the tours around Labor Day.
Thank you for your interest and support of the Foundation. Please let me know of ability to commit to the training for Tar Heels at your earliest convenience. If you have questions please call or email me and we can talk. If you have friends who might be interested in the program and able to make the commitment please forward my email and copy me when you forward the message.
If your name was already on my list of walking tour volunteers you do not need to respond to this email unless you just want to reconfirm your interest.
**If you are interested but unsure about the 2-4 tour commitment maybe 1 or 2 tours could work, please let me know. We will need all the volunteers we can recruit. We have approximately 11 volunteers to date, not counting staff who will do a few tours ourselves as well as serve as a back-up on occasions.