News Release

Yosemite National Park Celebrates the 10th Annual Volunteer of the Year Awards

Date: October 4, 2019

Yosemite National Park is proud to announce the 2019 recipients of the park’s Volunteer of the Year awards. These prestigious awards are bestowed annually to outstanding volunteers in nine different categories for exemplary service to Yosemite National Park.

In 2018, Yosemite National Park hosted over 13,000 volunteers who donated over 132,500 hours to help with a wide variety of volunteer projects. This annual award ceremony is held each year as part of Yosemite’s celebration of National Public Lands Day, and in conjunction with the Yosemite Facelift park-wide cleanup event.

These awards were presented in person at a special awards ceremony in Yosemite Valley on September 28, 2019.

The 2019 Award Recipients are:

• Jamie Gonzales, Community Builder Intern, Individual Volunteer of the Year
• Sean Smith, Resource Management, Individual Youth Volunteer of the Year
• Anne Katherine, Research Library Volunteer, Enduring Volunteer of the Year
• Latino Outdoors, Volunteer Group of the Year
• Paramount High School Green Club, Youth Volunteer Group of the Year
• Jeffrey Trust, Creative Media, Volunteer Supervisor of the Year
• Yosemite Conservancy and Preventive Search and Rescue Partnership, Yosemite Volunteer Program of the Year
• Nessarose Schear, NatureBridge Stewardship Educator of the Year
• Keith, Cara, and Evelyn Cody, Facelift Volunteers of the Year  

This award ceremony was held in conjunction with the 16th annual Yosemite Facelift, a park-wide clean up event. This year, 2,311 unique volunteers, including over 400 youth volunteers, came to Yosemite and provided 15,447 donated hours to help clean up trash throughout the park.

Over 16,000 pounds of trash was cleaned up from Yosemite National Park during the Yosemite Facelift event. The staff of Yosemite National Park is very proud of our critical partnership with the Yosemite Climbing Association and Yosemite Conservancy to help make the Yosemite Facelift a huge success. We thank all of our amazing volunteers who come from our Gateway Communities, from across the United States, and from around the world, for coming out to the park and for helping to make this great event possible.