Community partnerships are an integral part of our mission and vision; seeing the effective programmatic impact of those partnerships is a truly incredible feeling. In August, we successfully launched our “Birder’s Eye View” workshops in partnership with Mountain Area Land Trust (MALT) and received very positive feedback from program participants. These workshops were designed to provide a baseline set of skills for birding; our hope was to engage with participants at their level of birding knowledge, whether it be the basics or advanced. This led to enthusiastic participation from registrants of all skill levels; those with more birding knowledge were able to assist those who were just starting their identification journey. The communal aspects of these workshops were inspiring to observe and led to two very impactful bird outings. While the birding aspects of these workshops were not new concepts for our chapter, the partnership and development of the workshops was.
MALT reached out at the beginning of the year with an expressed interest in expanding bird monitoring capacity and community outreach for two properties they manage in Fairplay: Sacramento Creek Ranch and Pennsylvania Mountain Natural Area. Both of these properties are beautiful alpine locations with high biodiversity and a vast potential for community engagement. Fairplay is within our chapter’s zip codes, but is not an area we have dedicated many resources to in the past. This presented a wonderful opportunity to expand our outreach and cultivate a new partnership. The workshops were also supported by a graduate student with CSU who utilized this workshop as his capstone project, as well as Cornell Lab of Ornithology who awarded MALT with grant funding for the project. MALT’s hope is that these workshops will be a launching point for a volunteer base who will help monitor both properties indefinitely. This also provides Evergreen Audubon with direct areas of impact to expand our birding walks and programming in general. I am beyond thrilled by the prospects of this partnership and the many ways we can engage new audiences moving forward.
As we continue to expand our education and outreach, community partnerships like this one are critical to that growth. I am always open to hearing your ideas on additional opportunities for partnerships and ways we can broaden the reach of our message. The natural world is vast and so are the ways that people feel connected to nature – the expansion of our partnerships continually widen the net of our outreach, and hopefully, increases the number of people who are aware of the natural world and embrace the conservation of natural resources.
