A Day in the Life of a Program Coordinator at ECOSLO
A Program Coordinator's day at ECOSLO involves "a lot of emails, a lot of meetings, interacting with community members," but the work is highly seasonal, shifting from planning and research during the off-season to hands-on tasks like tree planting and cleanup events during peak periods, requiring flexibility to accommodate volunteer schedules.
Communication, Project Management, Community Engagement, Environmental Sustainability, Seasonal Work
Advizer Information
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Grant Helete
Program Coordinator
ECOSLO - Environmental Center of San Luis Obispo
California Polytechnic State University
N/A
Environmental & Related Sciences
Climate, Environment, Sustainability & Waste Management, Nonprofit, Foundations & Grantmaking
Operations and Project Management
Honors Student, Scholarship Recipient, Took Out Loans, Worked 20+ Hours in School, Transfer Student
Video Highlights
1. Program coordinators work with community members and do a lot of email and meeting communications.
2. The job has seasonality; in the summer and fall, there is a lot of planning and fieldwork for tree planting and cleanups.
3. There is flexibility in the schedule, especially when it comes to weekend volunteer events.
Transcript
What does a day in the life of a program coordinator look like?
This changes a lot with the day-to-day. Typically, we're doing a lot of emails, a lot of meetings, and interacting with community members.
However, there's a seasonality to the job, particularly for what we do at Eco Slow. My job looks a lot different in summer or fall, where we're doing a lot of planning for the upcoming tree-planting season. I'm often doing more meetings or spending more time on my computer doing research and planning.
When fall arrives, we're "pedal to the metal" with ordering trees and making sure everything is ready to go. Similar things happen with cleanups, which are typically in summer and fall. Our volunteer coordinator handles most of those, but I'll sometimes help out.
Whenever we have an event on weekends, my schedule flexes a lot. There's a lot of flexibility when doing volunteer events because you have to work around the volunteers' schedules.
So, there are certain hallmarks of my day, whether it's meetings and interacting with the community via email. Then there's seasonality to it, whether it's tree plantings on weekends, working with our interns and college fellows on maintenance, or being out in the field at a cleanup. There's a lot of flexibility to it, and that's why I like the job.
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