Community Volunteer Ambassadors: The Park Volunteer Builders Train in Fort Collins

Behind many park volunteer programs is a young professional whose job is to build them. The Community Volunteer Ambassadors (CVAs) are a fifty-week internship run by the National Park Service's Volunteers-In-Parks program with the Stewards Individual Placement Program of Conservation Legacy. In March 2024, the Winter 2024 cohort gathered in Fort Collins, Colorado, for its National Early Service Training.

The Winter 2024 cohort of Community Volunteer Ambassadors.

Who they are

Members are young people — ages 18 to 30, or up to 35 for veterans — from diverse backgrounds who hope for careers in service and conservation. They are placed in parks around the country to build capacity for connecting communities to parks through engagement and volunteering; in 2022 the program expected to place about 90 members.

The training

From March 18 to 22, 2024, a team from Conservation Legacy, Rocky Mountain National Park and the NPS Washington Support Office led sessions on:

• event planning, writing handbooks and local policies, and project management;
• leadership and communication, networking and handling conflict;
• cultural humility.

Second-year CVAs helped lead the sessions alongside NPS staff, sharing what they had learned at similar sites and welcoming the first-year members — a sign of how much a member can grow in a year.

The Climate Cohort of CVAs pose with staff from Conservation Legacy and NPS.

A climate cohort

New this year was a partnership with the NPS Climate Change Response Program. Its communications coordinator, Larry Perez, hosted the ambassadors at the NPS offices for a discussion of climate change optimism, introducing the program's first Climate Cohort. Its sites include Acadia, Christiansted, Pullman, Saguaro, War in the Pacific and Bering Land Bridge. The cohort is meant to advance climate resilience and education across the parks.

Sources

Based on "Community Volunteer Ambassadors: National Early Service Training held in Fort Collins, CO" from the National Park Service, a work of the United States government in the public domain. Pictures an earlier version of this page left out were restored on 2026-09-26.