Photo: Snow Geese, Noah Reiter/Audubon Photography Awards
Elizabeth “Libby” Lyons
ASNV is emerging from the pandemic re-energized and looking to boost its impact! Essential to this strategy is increasing our community engagement. We want to serve the wide range of communities in Northern Virginia more fully by providing them more opportunities to learn about and enjoy wildlife and nature. We also want to enable more community members to contribute to local conservation as volunteers.
So, last month the ASNV Board of Directors agreed to form a new Community Engagement Committee. Its charge is to reach out to our communities to recruit new members and volunteers and to coordinate how we work with those volunteers, involving them in the full array of ASNV activities, from education to advocacy to citizen science to conservation.
We recognize that Northern Virginia is a very special place that is filled with amazingly talented and passionate people, many of whom might like to use their skills to help protect birds and other wildlife. The chair of the new Community Engagement Committee is Stacey Remick-Simkins, herself a long-time volunteer in environmental and faith communities. She described the opportunity this way, “Because so many people are passionate about wildlife and nature, we have the chance to match their passion with community conservation and education activities. This allows that passion to grow and deliver tremendous benefits.”
Looking out several months, we plan to start bolstering our community engagement activities by addressing the growing and often unmet need for environmental information and nature outings from groups such as libraries, homeschoolers, elderly citizen centers, and boys’ and girls’ clubs. We hope to tap the enthusiasm and broad expertise of Northern Virginia residents by recruiting them, training them as volunteers, developing outreach and education materials for them, and sending them out across the region. And looking even further ahead, as we strengthen our ability to manage volunteers and have engaged many groups across Northern Virginia, we plan to focus on finding volunteers for ASNV community conservation projects that combine the strengths of our various programs.
We have an immediate need for volunteers:
We are seeking board members and volunteers to serve on ASNV’s committees. ASNV’s work is done by its committees, which are Adult Education, Advocacy, Audubon at Home, Citizen Science, Communications, Community Engagement, Conservation, Diversity and Inclusion, Finance, Fundraising, and Youth Education. We welcome inquiries from folks with a wide range of backgrounds.
We hope to identify at least a few volunteers to serve on the board or committees who have fundraising experience or a commitment to helping us with such efforts.
We also are looking for people who have experience managing volunteers. We are hoping to hire a part-time volunteer coordinator and would like to have this person work with a team of folks on our volunteer effort.
Please contact me if you are interested in volunteering to serve on the board or any of the committees, or to help us with fundraising or managing volunteers. And STAY TUNED because we will soon be recruiting volunteers more regularly for many of our activities!