Get Involved with ET!
Join a Campaign. Help us reach out. Be a volunteer or intern.
ET and You.
ET is a campaign-driven, largely virtual organization. It’s a structure of volunteers, including the management. It doesn’t maintain offices or ships or planes or science labs just to have them; which means it’s very protean. That’s how the group is kept streamlined, the overhead is kept down, and the organization is able to metamorphose to deal with new challenges.
It’s therefore a group which relies heavily on the donated efforts of those who decide to get involved. ET becomes their tool to making the world a bit better than it would otherwise be.
Depending on what’s going on at any given time, there stuff that needs doing can be about anything. We’ve had everything from musicians to mystics, from celebrities to undercover agents, from astronauts to web geeks involved at any one time. And some of them wind up doing things they’ll remember all their lives.
Then again, some of the really important work that needs doing is, well, boring. It’s never hard to find volunteers who want to do something stimulating, but a lot harder to find a person with enough motivation to sit and copy videotapes or do internet research. Yet it’s all needed.
Give it some thought. If you’ve come to a point in your life that you want to do something substantial for your world, for other species, and for the future of your own species, it may be that volunteering significant time with ET is a good idea. We won’t waste your time.
Interning with ET
Sometimes ET will take on a person who has promise and have them do a ton of unpaid work. Thought this may not sound like much of a good deal, it can be.
Internships are most often sought by young people who have gotten their college degrees, or are getting advanced degrees. There are relatively few places one can get actual field conservation work under their belt, and in terms of learning to be an effective environmental advocate there is no place to learn better than ET.
Of course, ET also works in some interesting places, and that can be a plus. Probably doesn’t hurt that our international headquarters is in Hawaii.
You’d thing that this “free labor” would be such a boon that we stack interns like cord wood. Not so. Unless we have an experienced ET staffmember to oversee and guide an intern, we don’t take him or her on. It takes time and energy to effectively brief and use an intern, and that’s in short supply. We get a lot of requests for free internships, and accept only relatively few.
Still, we hope you contact us. In general, one is more likely to land an internship if they’re interested in making a difference and willing to do boring stuff, and research that actually takes some work. It helps if you have your own living and housing costs covered, and are organized enough not to need full supervision after being given a project assignment.
If there are no specific internships mentioned on this page, odds are there aren’t any available now. Feel free to check back. And feel free to let us know you exist. Sometimes deep motivation will carve out a spot of its own.
Various help we need Now!
Hyperfunctional Social Media Nerds
As you may notice, we’re not that plugged into social media. We don’t want to do it halfway. It’d be great to have a volunteer team who really understand the nuts and bolts of the way social media is evolving. Are you an accomplished social media nerd? Could be you should become an integral part of the ET web network as it starts its next big expansion.
Scientific Research & fact-checking on the web
Help us keep the website, educational materials, and media productions in line with peer-reviewed science. Taken on research challenges. Author original articles for ET outreach. Help us suss out new project possibilities.
Dub the Video Archives to Digital Media
As one of the key global activist organizations over the last 40 years, ET has great gaboodles of video in its archives; much of it exists nowhere else. And much has been lost to the ravages of time. That’s one weakness of a group which only spends money the way donors ask… pretty much no donors ask to support the archives. And very few volunteers want to do the – let’s admit it – exacting drudgery involved in taking old analog videotapes and moving them to formats which can be viewed online. We have literally thousands of hours of it, some more important than others, on many different tape formats. This actually represents a number of sub-projects.
Join an ET Campaign!
There are links throughout the program sections of this website that allow you to join ET campaigns as a contributor and active participant. We hope you’ll get excited and get involved, because that’s the way campaigns like these move forward.
We exist at an extraordinary time, the earth’s 6th mass extinction. Its course, the course of all earth life, will to a great extent be determined by what is done in the coming 20 years.
Do Something Extraordinary
We try not to be just a generic “eco” organization in any way. So we also appreciate really creative, out-of-the-box ideas on how an individual might choose to get involved, either with ET or with helping the planet’s life-systems in general.
We live in extraordinary times – the earth’s 6th major mass extinction in the 3.5 billion years since life began. The course of that mass extinction will be largely determined by what humans do in this generation. And what we fail to do.
One normally things about volunteerism in terms of doing minor projects, donating ten bucks, passing around a petition. All good stuff… and wildly incommensurate with the actual crises barreling down the road toward the life systems of our planet.
These dire prospects are real, and have led various people to feelings ranging from apathy to self-destructiveness. Yet we think it’s possible to rise to the challenge. The future hasn’t yet been determined. So be creative. Think of something you are able to do that might help, and really consider doing it. That’s the sort of logic that caused us to create ET in the first place.
We’ve known people who work a regular job and decide to live on exactly one-half of their take-home, giving the other half to a program they’ve created and funded through ET. It sounds terrible, but those folks are happy they did it, because it added another dimension to their lives and made possible things that otherwise wouldn’t have happened.
Or a person who has done well in life might decide to go sit under the stars and think about what is really important to them… and then opt to live modestly and comfortably on a guaranteed stipend while converting the 1’s and zero’s in their bank account to real-time environmental initiatives which wouldn’t have happened otherwise. We’ve seen it work – it’s not just the super-wealthy who can start important initiatives. It’s people who have decided it’s part of what they should be.
All we can say is “be creative”, and make the decisions you will like yourself for making, when looking back over what you’ve done in life. That’s what we’ve done. And we’d love to see you do it too.
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Other ways of helping:
Donate frequent-flier miles – you may not have the time to use them all, but they’ll really come in handy for our campaign staff.
Donate your professional skills – Are you an attorney, a brain surgeon, a rocket scientist, an artist, a welder, a photographer, an internet expert, etc? You never know, we might really be able to use a donation of your professional services. Drop us an email!
Donation of useful stuff – recent computers, monitors, cameras, and other such stuff can often be used by ET, and the donation is tax deductible.
Volunteer your time – If you want to help and are near an ET admin or campaign office, we might be able to use you. Our needs vary depending on which projects and programs are active in a given area. The most valuable volunteers are those who can set aside a significant amount of time, and are willing to help even with boring stuff like dubbing videotapes, doing social networking, and helping with the hundreds of tasks it takes to make a group like ET function.
One of the very smartest ways to give is by transferring appreciated stocks to EarthTrust. You get to deduct the full appreciated value from your taxes, and we don’t have to pay capital gains taxes on it like you would have if you’d cashed it in directly.
And it’s super-easy to do. You just transfer the stock from your brokerage account to ours, and let us know. We handle the donation paperwork, you get the deduction for your tax year, and some really vital work gets done because you stepped up.
For a full current- year deduction on the market value of your gift of stock, transfer it to:
Scottrade
DTC: 0705
FBO: Earthtrust
Account No: 26304137
PH : 1-800-888-1980 (if you want to speak to a representative)
EarthTrust’s tax-exempt EIN number for your records is: 99-0172970
Send us note letting us know you’re on the team!
Any Questions? email us at Donations@EarthTrust.Org