Volunteer Needs From: Axe of Service

We are seeking musicians, especially fiddle/violin, viola, and cello players and people who can play by ear, who to help orchestra students during our monthly workshops at Flagstaff High School. Because it is a large class, it would be beneficial to have volunteers who could offer individual support and make sure all students are up to speed. 

Flag High Wild West Fiddlers brings authentic instruction in Irish fiddle and merges it with other forms such as Latin rhythms. Instruction aligns with the Wild West Fiddle Project, which researches and revives early Arizona folk music and dance traditions with a broad, multicultural lens including immigrant, Native, and fusion traditions.

We are working with FUSD for a pilot project offering carpooling to and from school for 4 priority schools and received a Sustainability Grant from the City of Flagstaff. This is an exciting project that is well on its way to success in improving our environment and lives of parents and kids. Now, we need help encouraging parents from these 4 chosen schools to sign on and try carpooling (at no cost to them).

Volunteers would distribute flyers and hold posters in drop-off lanes when school starts and ends being available to answer questions about carpooling. They also might help us to connect with and present to parent organizations and brainstorm other promotional ideas.

This is an exciting chance to make a real difference in getting an innovative and life-changing idea off the ground! 

You wouldn't need to commit to this on a regular basis, although that would certainly be appreciated. We are flexible to working with your schedule, availability, interests, and ideas and having you as part of the team! Might be fun to do as a friend group. 

Wild Steps' affiliate musical duo Wild World Irish Fiddle offers regular performances and workshops both for disabled people and for the general public. We would love to have dance assistants help out during these. If we have the same people help out regularly, that would be the best option; however, we are also open to occasional or one-off assistants, especially if you can learn and remember a dance quickly.

Kate will teach you the dances a little bit before the event, and you will teach them to audience members while Kate and Armand are playing. We did this with a concert at Coconino Center for the Arts in March, and it worked very well. We do it at our weekly show at Charly's and at concert dates here and there. Please peruse video of this (linked below).

We also need assistance for our community dances, including with disabled people:

4th Tuesday Inclusively Wild Irish Dance workshop with disabled adults at Quality Connections (1:30-2:30).

4th Wednesday Wild Irish Community Dance at the Montoya Center (6-8pm)

We are planning on a performance with the disabled dancers and could use help with all aspects of making that happen.

We need help optimizing social media to get the word out about our shows, including our “home”: Irish Night@Charly’s. This weekly event, Thursdays 7-9:30pm, celebrates cultural exchange through music, as we recreate traditions of music, dance, and community, and invite audience members to participate and share the richness of their own backgrounds. This involves people across cultures and ages (from ages 7-77 is what we’ve seen) dancing together and listening to original music blending Celtic and Latin traditions. 

We believe there would be a much larger turnout if we could optimize social media presence and brainstorm other ways to inform people that this exists. People love the event when they do find out about it, but most are just by chance and are out of towners. We'd like to cultivate a regular local following. We are also interested in help finding musicians for our guest musician program at this same show, which brings in talent from various traditions.

We have Facebook, Instagram, and a YouTube channel, but we’re not sure how to increase impact of these resources and expand our presence. 

Flyers and posting on calendars/ updating posts would be great in addition to social media spreading, as would taking and posting video and photos of our shows, though different volunteers could do different tasks.

We believe you can come up with ideas that would make this show take off!

Filming and taking photos during Wild World Irish Fiddle community dance and live music events. This would also help greatly with getting the word out! Filming directly to our Instagram would be powerful. Just having documentation of what we do is always extremely helpful, and it’ll keep our YouTube channel up to date.

We are playing for the Celtic Festival July 19-20 and would love help then, or at a future concert as well as our regular show. Volunteers can do this on a one-off or more frequent basis and do not need equipment or experience, just motivation and interest.  

Seeking new opportunities for what we do. Liaising with facilities for elderly, disabled, and other vulnerable populations and seeking new partnerships with them would expand our outreach. Finding all kinds of new venues for concerts, festival presences, and workshops would further our mission of cross-cultural understanding and community enjoyment through music and dance.

Concretely, a volunteer team would identify opportunities, develop/improve marketing materials, and reach out to venues. We envision a team that works well together and has complementary skill sets.

Research for the Wild West Fiddle Project. We found that there is a lack of research on music and dance traditions from present-day Arizona and the Colorado Plateau, though we know these were a vibrant part of life. We seek to find out as much as we can about this, including what tunes were played and dances danced, and how different cultural traditions combined. We’d like to recreate these through interactive concerts, workshops, and dances. All aspects and methods of research and involvement around this topic are welcome!

Concretely speaking, volunteers might comb through archives, locate recordings and sheet music, find and talk with elders, discover immigrant and Native past with regard to music and dance, and interact with professors, historians, and history museum employees, as well as identifying new ways to do such research.

There are two Advisory Board openings: one for legal and one for financial advice. The goal is for our new organization to grow on a solid foundation of continued fiscal and administrative health through ongoing support in navigating administrative challenges regarding fiscal and organizational possibilities and protocols. 

Concretely speaking, we are seeking qualified and/or experienced legal and financial people who believe in what we are doing and have a passion for service or just want to give back to the community through filling in gaps in what we know and can do. This includes going over our finances with us and our administrative paperwork to make sure we are doing everything correctly and letting us know what we might need to do better and what options could help us grow. 

We'd like some templates that we can easily adapt to add different times and venues. We can provide photos and text, and you can work your visual magic!

Can you help us put up flyers for our events around NAU, downtown, East Flag, and/or any other locality you visit where people might be interested in music and dance? This would involve picking up flyers at our locale (my house) near NAU and distributing them far and wide, whenever/wherever you can. 

As a new nonprofit, we recognize the importance of having a website. We would like to provide content to a motivated volunteer who will research cheap and user-friendly platforms and after we subscribe, will create the website to make professional looking and visually appealing content. They can manage it (putting up new content we give) for as long as they want thereafter and set it up so future volunteers can do so. 

We would love volunteers ASAP to start promoting this event via flyers and social media! We seek to build a dynamic logistics team to see this festival through from start to finish, though if people just want to do a shift here and there, that's okay too. 

For the day of the festival, Oct. 25, we will need people all day to welcome out-of-town musicians, greet festival-goers, and overall keep things running smoothly. This is in partnership with The Literacy Center and is largely a fundraiser to support their and Wild Steps' programs.

This festival brings together musicians who venture deeply into the roots of a tradition to the place where their deep roots intertwine with the deep roots from other traditions; community-based entertainment and education is at the core, as each act will show dance steps from their cultures, answer questions, lead workshops, and all performers may jam together on stage at the end.