Volunteer
with Us
The Heart & Soul of Traveling Stories
Volunteers are the heart, soul and hands of our nonprofit! When you volunteer to read with and mentor children, you’re making a difference in their lives, which is why we truly consider our volunteers heroes.
Help Us Empower Children to Achieve Their Dreams
Ready to help children fall in love with reading, build a sense of community, learn financial literacy skills, and become self advocates? Learn more about our volunteer opportunities below.
Reading Mentor Volunteer
Our Virtual StoryTent allows us to scale our program to provide literacy support and mentoring to more children, but we need your help to grow! Vetted and trained reading mentors host one-on-one weekly video calls with children entering 1st -3rd grade to read together and chat about books. Using Book Bucks and prizes, children set goals and work with their mentor to achieve them. Children learn delayed gratification, financial literacy skills, and increase their belief in their ability to achieve. The time commitment is 1 hour per week for 9 consecutive weeks plus approximately 2 hours of virtual training.
Virtual Help Desk
Traveling Stories is in need of friendly volunteers to help us keep our Virtual StoryTent running smoothly. Our Help Desk department has two volunteer roles:
1) Help Desk Volunteer: Monitors sessions virtually and provide minimal assistance to readers or volunteers as needed via text and email. Duties may include admitting readers/volunteers into their Google Meet session, sending a reminder text if a reader or volunteer is absent, and providing basic customer service to readers or volunteers. The time commitment is 1-3 hours per week.
2) Help Desk Captain: Solves problems that have been identified by Help Desk Volunteers. This may include looking up a reader/volunteer’s login info, troubleshooting a tech challenge, and issuing Book Bucks when a session has to be cancelled last minute. This role is ideal for a student looking to get more hands-on leadership experience while logging volunteer hours.
In-Person Volunteer
Sadly our in-person StoryTent programs are still not running due to COVD-19. But as our Virtual StoryTent enrollment grows, we’re adding more opportunities to help in-person with prize and book fulfillment. Contact us to learn more about all of our in-person volunteer opportunities. Safety and social distancing protocols followed during COVID-19.
Have Questions About Volunteering?
Did You Know?
Children who are “well-read-to” (at least 5x a week), when asked to tell a story, used more literary language than unread to children, and they used more sophisticated syntactic forms, longer phrases, and relative clauses. They were also better able to understand the oral and written language of others – an important foundation for the comprehension skills that will develop in the coming years.
— Wolf, M. (2007). Proust and the Squid: The Story and Science of the Reading Brain. New York: Harper Perennial.