Hello Volunteers.

Although you volunteer your time and effort to help environmental and community conditions, those efforts are not well understood and therefore, not well appreciated. The University of Washington Human Dimensions of Natural Resource Management research group is conducting a joint study with the U.S. Forest Service to enhance our understanding of volunteering and stewardship in the Seattle-Tacoma region. In order to elucidate the important roles that volunteers play in improving their communities and environments, we are requesting that past and present volunteers complete a short electronic survey.

The survey will take about 15-20 minutes and attempts to understand why you volunteer, what constrains you from volunteering as much as you would like, what your commitments, if any, are to volunteering, and who volunteers are in terms of demographics. The survey also has a few measures of loyalty to volunteering. Your participation will greatly help efforts to give volunteering and volunteers the status they deserve in our society. The results of our study and analyses will be shared with every participating volunteer coordinating organization that is interested in knowing how motivated, committed, loyal, and constrained their volunteers are.

The survey has been approved by the University of Washington's Human Subjects Division, under Certificate of Exemption #40050, to ensure that your privacy is completely protected. The Human Subjects' division requires that your email address and name are not associated with any report or public records that result from the study.

If you accept to participate in the study, please contact David French at dfrench@uw.edu.

You'll be receiving an online survey from Dr. Asah of the College of the Environment in the near future.

Thank you for your anticipated cooperation. If you have any questions regarding the study, please contact:

Stanley T. Asah, Assistant Professor, College of the Environment
stasah@u.washington.edu, 206-685-4960