CHIPPING IN OR CHIPPING AWAY?

Published in the Nov. 29, 2025 issue.

“Where have the philanthropists gone?” lamented Robert Joki, president of the Southern Mono Historical Society, as he reflected on the organization’s uncertain future.

For decades, the Society has preserved local history through the Mammoth Museum at the Hayden Cabin. But in recent years, membership has thinned, and the days of a full board and a dedicated group of paying members are largely in the past. Many former members and donors have aged, moved away, or passed on.

Joki, involved for 14 years, remembers better times. “When I took over, we had a decent board of longtime Mammoth residents and about a hundred members,” he said.

These days, just three board members remain, and funding barely covers basic operations. Even the trolley program, which once staffed Mammoth’s public transit with singing historical guides, stalled last year after the person who trained the employees moved away.

With this all at the forefront of his mind, Joki worries about the organization’s longevity.

“My original plan was to sit on my porch playing the banjo until I forget what my name was,” he said. “It wasn’t to have the stress of keeping an organization afloat.”

He’s not alone in his experience or anxiety. Over the last few weeks, The Sheet spoke to several non-profit leaders, and many told the same story. The current volunteer class is aging out, and nobody’s taking their place. And with monetary giving seemingly declining too, it’s a challenge to operate a non-profit at all.

Juliana Olinka-Jones is an active volunteer at the Mammoth Lakes Lions Club, which raises money to distribute funds to various causes within the community, and serves on a few other non-profit advisory boards in Mammoth.

She, like Joki, is worried about succession planning for the organizations she’s a part of.

“The biggest challenge [for organizations right now] is spreading your message widely enough so that you can continue to bring new people in and have them carry on the mission of the organization.”

The Lions Club started with a group of passionate individuals, she said, but that fleet of volunteers is dwindling in size and in capability.

The July 4 Pancake Breakfast is the club’s biggest annual fundraiser. While attendance has remained relatively consistent over the years, there has been a decline in the number of volunteers available to man the grill and fewer people with large trucks to transport materials.

“There were a lot of people who worked in construction or who had businesses [when the organization started], and those people are aging out,” Olinka-Jones said. “The new people coming in don’t necessarily have the same interest.”

Alicia Olson is the Lions Club’s youngest member and has been for several years, even though she’s in her mid-thirties. Given the struggle to maintain the annual breakfast, she said the club may have to change the kind of fundraiser it does to meet the age and abilities of its members.

“As long as there’s some kind of community fundraising event, [the Club] will still exist,” Olson said.

In light of the apparent lack of volunteers, organizations have taken different approaches to future planning. 

At Wild Iris, a domestic violence victim support organization, Executive Director Dominic Hays is shifting away from relying on volunteers altogether.

He once dedicated a lot of effort to recruiting volunteers, but despite his efforts, Wild Iris has struggled to recruit enough people.

While other domestic violence victim support organizations across the state are able to train large groups of volunteers, Wild Iris has to conduct one-on-one training due to its limited volunteer pool.

This is a problem because volunteers for the organization are required to go through 30-70 hours of training before they can start working, and, when they do, many realize they’re not ready for the commitment and drop out.

“It would be very beneficial for us to have a big volunteer pool, but because we tend to invest a lot of time –– which is money –– into training volunteers, just for them to leave pretty quickly, we’ve decided to stop actively recruiting volunteers,” he said.

Across the board, he said people are choosy with where they want to donate their time and money, and it’s just too hard to “compete” with other causes in the area to rely on a volunteer or philanthropic base.

Other organizations, however, aren’t ready to give up yet.

At the Laws Museum & Historical Site in Bishop, for one, Administrator Jessi Robbins has been working to digitize the organization’s outreach, and has seen marginal success in expanding the organization’s volunteer base.

Everything was very “pen and paper” when she first took office, she said.

“A lot of [our volunteers] are a little bit older, which is fantastic because they have a lot of history and a lot of knowledge,” she said. “But we don’t get a lot of younger people, and so the hope is that with social media we can start reaching younger populations […] and get a variety of people volunteering.”

In doing more social media work and updating the website, she’s seen volunteerism rates return slightly.

Friends of the Inyo, meanwhile, has dedicated significant time and effort to recruiting volunteers and creating engaging volunteer events… and it’s paying off.

In part, it may come down to timing and circumstance. As an organization dedicated to protecting public lands in Mono and Inyo Counties, Friends of the Inyo benefits from strong local support in an area largely defined by, and valued for, its public lands. Especially as public lands have become a hot-button political topic.

“In a sense, it boils down to marketing,” explained Izzy Taylor, Stewardship Director for Friends of the Inyo. “What we do may align more with what the public values. We are a public land advocacy nonprofit in an area where public lands make up most of the economy.”

As a result, both volunteer numbers and volunteer hours have increased in recent years, she said.

“We’re seeing an increase in volunteerism because everybody’s very aware that the national parks and public lands are under a lot of strain this year,” she said.

What the future of volunteerism may ultimately come down to is what the local public cares about. 

In Juliana Olinka-Jones’ words, “How do you get people to care about a civic organization like the Lions Club?”

People are willing to show up for a trash clean-up or line the streets for a protest, but what’s happening here might signal something more concerning: a loss of community.

In the eyes of Robert Joki and Dominic Hays at least, the Eastern Sierra population is becoming “increasingly transient.”

They feel there is an increasing gap between vacationers and the strong local pride that has historically driven volunteerism and philanthropic efforts. The wealthiest individuals in the area, often second-homeowners, are spending their time and money primarily in the places where they live full-time.

In years past, the history of the town, the stories of its people, and the effort to preserve its heritage were deeply personal to those who lived here. The challenge now is that as the community becomes more fluid, fewer people have that long-term, invested connection to these ideals.

Retired people have long formed the backbone of volunteer labor: people with time, experience, and a desire to give back. That hasn’t changed. What has changed is that there isn’t a new class of retirees stepping in to fill the gaps left by the old guard. And that absence raises uncomfortable questions.

If nothing else, the values of the area are evolving. But whether those priorities are moving toward new causes or are a sign people are distancing themselves from civic involvement altogether will determine the fate of several local non-profits.