A museum of volunteers

This is the 5th in our monthly series of posts celebrating Western Science Center's 20th anniversary.

The Western Science Center currently has 18 paid employees, the largest our staff has ever been. And yet, given our scope of research, our busy programming and field trip schedule, and our aggressive exhibit rotation schedule, we don't have nearly enough employees to cover everything. Accomplishing all of this work is heavily dependent on the efforts of our volunteers. Ranging in age from 12 to 88, our volunteers worked a total of 6,875 hours in 2025 alone.

We currently have 43 "regular" volunteers – adults that generally work a weekly schedule. The volunteers do almost everything; working as floor docents, teaching activities for school field trips, helping to organize and staff special events and offsite events, excavating and preparing fossils, dissecting specimens, producing replica fossils, collections data entry, and more. New adult volunteers all undergo floor training to learn to be docents, and some then receive additional and ongoing training for other tasks such as lab preparation. Our adult volunteers come from a variety of backgrounds and with different skill sets; many are current college students, some are current or retired teachers or college professors, many are retirees from a whole range of professions, and some are currently in the workforce but just love museums and science and come to help on their days off.

We also have an active junior volunteer program for children age 12-17. They generally also work a weekly schedule, with each student assigned to work with a staff member as their primary supervisor. The juniors do pretty much the same tasks as the adult volunteers, except that they don't work as docents until they turn 16. Currently we have 18 junior volunteers.

We also have approximately 40 Science Saturday volunteers. These high school students work one Saturday each month, teaching activities at our Science Saturday events for children, as well as helping with setup and breakdown at our three major annual events (Science Under the Stars, PaleoCon, and the Inland Empire Science Festival).

While John holds the record for our longest-serving volunteer, many of our volunteers have been with us 10 years or more. Even some of our junior volunteers have been with us for 5 years! Seven children of employees are currently or have been WSC volunteers. And of our 18 employees, 6 of them started their time at WSC as volunteers.

If you live in Southern California and are interested in volunteering at WSC, you can fill out an application on our website.

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