Volunteer Needs From: Axe of Service

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. 

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.