Preserving the Knowledge to Preserve!

In this forum, we sometimes see examples where professional restoration organizations, like Strasburg RR or the C&TS, have actively hired younger workers who are interested in learning the restoration trades so that critical skills are passed on the future generations. It's a long-term commitment that I think we all applaud. This probably happens more than is obvious, but those are the two that I pay attention to.

But what about volunteer restoration projects? Within the Friends of the C&TS, we've had many discussions that normally, our typical volunteers have been able to retire from their long-time careers and now have the time to come to our week-long work sessions. But that means a volunteer is older and may not learn everything they need before starting on a critical project. Have other restoration organizations that depend primarily on volunteers addressed this concern? Has there been any formal program of trying to preserve the knowledge to preserve?

In the Friends, we're dipping our toes into the water here. For instance, on a project I worked on a couple of weeks ago, we spent about 4 days performing something I originally thought would take about 3 hours. On my drive home, I kept on thinking, "I really wish before we started, I knew what I know now." So I wrote up a description of the work we did, along with a set of "Lessons Learned". Fortunately, we had one of our people taking photographs, and I was able to write up the narrative around those. Along the way, I noted a safety item that would be good to watch out for the next time we encounter a similar situation. My hope is that this document is available to other projects that are doing similar work, so they can avoid the same frustration. It would have been nice to have a video camera available for documenting some of this, but we did what we could.

The next step is to formalize this and perform this activity during a full-scale work session. We've always documented our work with photos, but the difference here is to turn those photographs and videos into an instructional document so that the knowledge and experiences are kept for prosperity.

I'm interested in hearing from anyone here that has similar ideas. (I might eventually venture to rypn.org and ask the same question, but I'll start here)

Bill Kepner