MOSES LAKE, Wash. — Dawna Sandmann lives in her camper during the week of the Grant County Fair.

“I do not go home,” she said. “You’re pretty much on call if there’s something going wrong. … I’m here Monday at noon when we do check-in to Sunday morning.”

Sandmann has volunteered at the fair in Moses Lake, Wash., for 15 years. She started as a 4-H leader, and then became sheep superintendent, a role she’s filled for eight years.

It’s getting harder to find volunteers, she said.

“People are so busy with just life, and I get it, I was that mom, too,” she said. “Nobody’s stepping up to put the time in. No volunteer group works with the same four people — we need new blood.”

Volunteers are the “backbone” of fairs, said Andrea Thayer, president of the Washington State Fairs Association board and chief experience officer for the Washington State Fair in Puyallup.

Thayer believes the total number of volunteers is fairly stable, but the ease of finding them varies by location. Some fairs have good, well-developed systems for volunteers, while others are competing for volunteers’ time.

In 2019, roughly 5,600 people volunteered at fairs across the state, according to an economic impact study from the association and state Department of Agriculture.

About 35% of Washington’s agricultural fairs rely solely on volunteers. Other fairs have a combination of paid staff and volunteers.

Finding paid staff can be a struggle, too, she said.

“We’re all temporary events that people take time off from their normal routines to participate in,” she said.

Jim McKiernan, director of the Grant County Fairgrounds in Moses Lake, said the number of volunteers has gone down in recent years. It reflects the difficulty civic organizations and volunteer fire departments also face in attracting volunteers, he said.

He thinks it might be a “generational thing.”

“I think in the technology age, people just don’t interact with each other as much as they used to,” McKiernan said. “That was part of being a volunteer, was the social aspect to it. That’s how you met people, that’s how you met your neighbors.”

It used to be more “innate” that someone would volunteer their time at the fair because they were showing animals or entering a competition, Thayer said.

But as one generation of volunteers begins to retire, she believes the next generation coming in has great potential.

“They want to be connected to organizations and events that they believe in, that they authentically feel connected to,” she said.

The opportunity lies in speaking to that generation “in their language,” Thayer said. That includes emphasizing how fairs raise donations for the community food bank or to educate youth.

“Just rethinking how we gather our volunteers is probably our next step,” she said. “We are very proactive in the fair world. … We have a purpose to serve. We need to make sure we’re relevant to that purpose for the next generation.”

Sandmann, the Grant County Fair sheep superintendent, urges people to just go ahead and volunteer.

“If you think you can’t do it, you’re wrong,” she said. “If you’re at all interested, at least try it.”

“People still have a yearning to get back to some basic, family-style roots and a fair kind of gets you back to that,” McKiernan said.

“The fair is the fabric of our communities,” Thayer said. “It’s a gathering point. … Whether or not they have day-to-day commonalities, they can come during the fair and really connect together in a different way, and your volunteers are at the heart of that.”