Volunteer
Spirits Alive is an all-volunteer organization. If you would like to help, please email us or drop us a line.
Volunteers include Master Gardeners, neighbors, history buffs, cemetery supporters, and green space enthusiasts. Since its inception, Spirits Alive volunteers have:
- Planted over 100 trees and flowering shrubs
- Successfully advocated for more public access to the site
- Raised funds for and installed granite bench seating
- Created and led walking tours
- Sponsored "Beyond the Gates – Art Inspired by the Eastern Cemetery,” a summer-long artist program
- Held a Stone conservation training workshop
- Hosted evening “Walk Among the Shadows” tours
- Began a stone inventory and restoration program
- Conducted yearly winter lecture series
Opportunities
Tour Guides: The cemetery annually attracts natives and people from away who love old cemeteries and all that goes with them. Spirits Alive offers regular cemetery tours at 1:30 every Sunday beginning in July and continuing through mid-October. The script for the tour covers subjects such as – famous people interred there, some early history of Portland, gravestone art and its symbolism, and explanation of the construction of the tombs and the City’s “dead house” (the winter holding tomb.) If you decide you would like to become a tour guide for the season, you should know that you will be called upon to give a tour just once a month. You will be thoroughly trained.
- You will be walking on uneven ground some of the time and should be able to negotiate that.
- The tour will take about 60 to 90 minutes, depending upon your tourists’ curiosity and your decisions to embellish the script.
- Also, at the beginning of the tour you will be expected to collect the tour fee and contact information from the tourists. We will work with you to find the most convenient way for you to get the money back to Spirits Alive. Every penny of the tour fee is used for projects that improve the cemetery.
Press Contact and Outreach: this person would be responsible for writing and disseminating press releases for us as well as reaching out to media contacts to inform them of cemetery-related events and alerts. Right now we have a rinky-dink system for this process and it could use a bit of a spruce up by someone skilled in this area.
Workdays in the cemetery: anyone willing to wield a wheelbarrow, dig holes for trees and bushes, lug heavy water buckets or simply hand-trim around stones on their knees is welcome!
Stone Transcription Survey: our stone survey continues. Volunteers are needed: folks who enjoy transcription and measuring stones — love of history, archaeology, culture, geology, dirt, and Portland people required.