Jane Ferry is a people person. Whether it’s spending time at Tyler Arboretum (either as a volunteer or a visitor), helping out at the Media Food Bank, or lunching in Media Borough, she likes to be around people and she likes to get to know people. As the person who records all of Tyler’s volunteer hours into the computer system, she gets to know who all of the volunteers are at Tyler. When she walks around Tyler, she loves to match the faces she meets to the names she sees doing data entry.
A member of Tyler since 1993, Jane has been volunteering doing computer work here since she retired from DuPont in 2009 (after 35 years there). When she and her husband moved to Media in 1993, they had a backyard that was a “blank canvas,” so she loved Tyler’s Annual Plant Sale because she would buy things to plant in her yard. Now, 30+ years later, things she bought in 1993 are now well-established and flourishing in her yard. The picture in this article is a Bald Cypress tree that she planted in 1996!
So, of course when she retired, she thought of volunteering at Tyler. She knew she wanted to do office work because that is what she was used to doing at DuPont, and she was already doing a lot of horticultural work in her own backyard. She put in her application and she began inputting volunteer hours into Tyler’s system. When she first started, all of her work was paper-based and deciphering volunteers’ handwriting on time sheets was certainly a challenge! Now, everything is computerized, so she no longer needs to be a handwriting decoder.
When Jane is not at Tyler, one might find her volunteering at the Media Food Bank (where she has been a volunteer for ten years), out and about in Media Borough, or bowling on Tuesdays from September to May. But you will not find her at any of these places, including Tyler, on Sundays when the Eagles are playing (E-A-G-L-E-S Eagles!).
She explains that the main perk of continuing to volunteer at Tyler after all this time is that she gets to know the names of all of the volunteers and meet lots of people. Her favorite place at Tyler is by the pond, her favorite event is the plant sale and her favorite time of year at Tyler is Spring. She also really enjoys attending the volunteer appreciation events and helping to check in people at other events. The main perk of being a Tyler volunteer is really just coming to Tyler. It’s just a “nice spot” to visit, she says.
