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Comment by boomboomsubban | Hacker News Reader

I wasn't expecting paid work, but I also wasn't expecting "come live in this cabin for several months while you work full time in a visitors bureau."

The map data entry opportunity that seems to be available in every state was closer to what I expected, some projects people could spend a few hours a week on in their hometown.

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A family member works one of these jobs, so it’s probably my bias that this is reasonable. They love it and live off a military pension, getting to live in the wilderness (a national park near the Canadian border) and provide service to others who want to experience it.

There's really only two kinds of people I can see going for these. Those like your family member, with a steady revenue source and a desire to spend 40+ hours a week in a park anyway, and those hoping to leverage this into a paying gig.

This isn't a bad thing, just isn't what I expected when I saw this post.

You can filter the opportunities to only show "Event" types (as opposed to "Position" types) which are things like one-off volunteer events like this one: https://www.volunteer.gov/s/volunteer-opportunity/a093d00000...

But in general, I agree with you. From what I can tell, even though this is just broadly called "volunteer.gov", it really seems like it's specific to the Bureau of Land Management/National Park Service, and is missing a large amount of types of positions that I think most people would expect when they think "go volunteer".

Old enough to recall a time when parks and museums were free of admission costs as was the parking? Congress in all its wisdom slashed those budgets but good over the last 4 decades and these job postings are symptomatic of these Bureau of Land Management/National Park Service fiscal funding revisions as well.

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