Do your community service hours with us!

Education Program Volunteer

YUWR is looking for self-motivated volunteers who like to make presentations in front of elementary school-aged children. The ability to present a 45 minute slideshow about local wildlife in a fun and exciting way to keep the interest of kids is a must! Please contact us for more details.

Internship Program

YUWR offers an internship program for pre-vet students and wildlife biology students. Interns must commit to 10 hours a week of volunteer time, performing duties ranging from animal care, veterinary appointments, to cleaning and maintenance. At the end of the internship period, a certificate of appreciation as well as a recommendation letter will be provided to the intern for submission to any veterinary school or University. A timesheet of hours worked will also be provided. During this internship period, the intern will learn hands-on care and rehabilitation of wildlife animals. An experience like this is a requirement for many veterinary programs, and can only help your chances for acceptance!

Here is our internship application:  Internship Application

Please print this out, look it over and give us a call at 510-547-9897 or email at lila@yuwr.org to schedule a training session to get you started.

Grant Writing

We are currently looking for a grant writer to assist us in finding grants for this work. For years we have struggled to survive, hand-to-mouth, trying to find grantwriters willing to help us. We have accrewed a frightening level of debt, professional and personal, keeping the wildlife center open. We have had people volunteer to grantwrite for us then never hear from them again after they got our sensitive financial documents. In an effort to avoid this pitfall, we are now offering a paid position of Grantwriter.This is our  ONLY paid position. We are otherwise completely volunteer-run. We are seeking a grantwriter who will work on contingency. You will get 3% of the fund from any grant you acquire for our wildlife center.  Experience is a big Plus! If you are interested, please contact us at 510-547-9897 or via email at lila@yuwr.org. Thank you for your interest.

Public Information Outreach and Fundraising

Part of our work consists of educating the public on how important our urban wildlife is and why. We have fliers and pamplets on how to live with urban wildlife and how beneficial urban wildlife is in direct ways. For example, opossums are wonderful mousers and snailers. When snail-bait is used, opossums eat the snails and die from the poison, allowing mice move into their territory. Wouldn’t you rather have an opossum living under your house eating all your mice and snails?

We also depend on Fundraising, and always welcome volunteers to our fundraising efforts. Periodic fundraising efforts will be published in detail in our News & Events blog.

Transportation

Many injured animals are brought to the Berkeley or Oakland Animal Care & Control. Often, these city departments are overwhelmed with other problems and are not able to transport these animals to facilities better equipped to care for their medical needs, such as ours. We want to develop a transport team to be on standby in the case that Animal Care & Control is unable to transport an animal. Responsible, insured drivers needed.

Fostering

We are looking for dedicated, responsible volunteers who have the time and are willing to take home a small group of wildlife babies who need regular nursing, and bottle-feed and care for them as they grow, according to our protocols.

Home Care is both the most rewarding and most difficult part of this work. It will change your life and enrich your world, but it is time consuming. You will need the ability to feed these babies every 2+ hours during the day when they are very young, graduating to fewer and fewer feedings throughout the day as they grow up. For their first 6 weeks of life, during this critical time, they can travel with you in a nestbox for feeding. (check with your job to ensure that your boss will allow this, if needed) You will also need a safe, quiet room in your home to keep their playcage that is free from pets or human traffic. When they are older, you have the choice of continuing their care by providing them an outdoor pre-release cage in your backyard, or you can return them to us for placement in one of our outdoor pens.

If you are interested, please watch our events calendar to learn of future training classes.