If you would like to volunteer for this year's Oceanside Dia de los Muertos Festival, please click on the button below and fill out the online Volunteer Application. Thank You!

 

Oceanside Dia de los Muertos is an action packed, toe-tapping, family friendly, cultural festival held in Oceanside each year. This will be our 22nd year of its existence in Oceanside on October 22, 2023.  Volunteers make it a success each year!!

• Volunteers help with putting up posters before the event. 

• Setup of the event the whole day prior.   Altar preparation, offload of flowers, decoration of venue and setup of equipment.

• The day starts out with volunteer check in and a chaotic array of tasks for setup. 

• At the heart of the festival, there were over 20 altars (ofrendas).  Each altar is an intricate display of thousands of marigolds, food, pictures, items that people loved and much, much more.  Volunteers help the altar builders put the altars together.

• Volunteers help with the interactive Chalk Cemetery where patrons can make their own memorial to a loved one.  This involves lots of candles, chalk, and thousands of flowers.  Each year we have well over 1000 patrons that participate.

• Several Community groups setup children's activities with making paper flowers, masks, ring toss, books, picture taking and more.  Volunteers assist with each of these groups.

• Marigold Flower booths are setup for festival patrons to purchase at the event.  All proceeds go to the cost of doing the event.

• Volunteers help with assisting over 10 sponsors and 150 vendors onto the venue.  From about 5:45 until 9am. The check in process, positioning, getting situated and providing basic and involved answers to the vendors can be a mind- boggling task.  The volunteers do an excellent job in assisting with both load in and load out (end of day) of all of these vendors and sponsors ensuring that safety of both the participants and patrons was met.

• Dia de los Muertos is a family friendly festival and our volunteers help by providing the best of customer service in Oceanside by giving back to their community.  

• So many volunteers help each year.  I can’t thank them enough for making it a success for the festival guests, vendors, altar builders, entertainment and more every year.
   

Sincerely, 

Cathy Nykiel, Board President

Friends of Oceanside Dia de los Muertos