Description
Start Date-End Date: 04/27/2019-04/27/2019
Land Manager Office: Bluff Lake Nature Center
Land Manager Contact: Rachel Crouch
Funding Partner:
Programmatic Partner:
Summary: No registration required for this fun family-friendly morning!
Description: Project photo courtesy of Bluff Lake Nature Center.
Where You'll Be:
Located in the Stapleton area of Denver, the Bluff Lake Nature Center is a 123-acre wildlife refuge that allows people of all ages the chance to connect with nature without leaving the city. As the city's largest open space, Bluff Lake Nature Center engages thousands of school groups in environmental education and is home to beavers, bats, turtles, and hundreds of other bird, mammal, insect, and plant species.
What You'll Do:
Celebrate Earth Day at Bluff Lake Nature Center's Family Nature Adventure Day! No registration is required; just show up Saturday morning with the family to enjoy outdoorsy activities, crafts, scavenger hunts, and a VOC-led effort to remove invasive plants. This is a great way to explore nature in the heart of the city and introduce the children in your life to the joys of the outdoors and volunteering.
About Volunteers for Outdoor Colorado (VOC)
Volunteers for Outdoor Colorado (VOC) is the state's oldest, largest, and leading outdoor stewardship nonprofit organization. Founded in 1984 to motivate and enable people to become active stewards of Colorado's natural resources, VOC has engaged nearly 120,000 people in more than 1,000 volunteer projects for a donated labor value of $24 million. Through award-winning youth and volunteer programs, leadership training, capacity-building programs, and collaborative efforts with nonprofits and land management agencies, VOC is an invaluable resource in Colorado, especially as our outdoor stewardship needs are approaching near-crisis levels. For more information, visit www.voc.org or call 303-715-1010.
Latitude/Longitude: 39.759172, -104.857150
Additional Information:
Camping Available: No
Physical Difficulty: Easy
High Altitude Project: No
Desired Number of Volunteers: 100
Total Adult Volunteers Attended: 28
Total Youth Volunteers Attended: 21
Total Volunteer Days: 49
Total Unique Volunteers: 49
Total Volunteer Hours: 155.5
Staff Hours: 9
Stipend Hours: 0
Project Summary: Overall, this was a successful project! Hosted by Bluff Lake Nature Center, VOC had a table situated along the Bluff Lake loop, where we were one of three stations on FamilyEarth Day. 49 volunteers signed in and collected 10 large (and very heavy) gallon trash bags, in addition to about 20 grocery-sized bags of seeds that were dispersed on the hillside. Bluff Lake expected over 100, so this was a bit of an overestimate.
One volunteer showed up at 7:15 (had heard about the project from VOC's website), and the rest came and went from 8:00 to 11:00. There was one corporate group (Quisitive) that brought 9 volunteers along. There were 22 volunteers that actually signed in and out and 27 that only marked their start time. Adding up all the time (and using the average for those who didn't sign out), the work totaled to over 108 hours!
Successes and Challenges: Things to consider:
- Bluff Lake does not have water
- The Nature Center does not have knowledge regarding land management and maintenance, so if we want to do more technical projects, we are going to need to bring in support
- Trash pick up will only be rewarding here if the city has not already come by and cleaned up the area by the storm drain
- Flexible volunteering was a success, especially for folks who needed to get community service hours in (students and corporate groups)
- Handwriting was difficult to read, and I would highly consider bringing a laptop to the next flexible volunteering project to track name, email, and maybe how they heard about us?
- Having multiple options for flexible volunteering was great - volunteers could decide to pick up trash, or disperse seeds which made for interesting and diverse work
Lessons Learned: With regards to flexible volunteering, the fact there was already an event going on at Bluff Lake (Family Earth Day) may have affected our numbers. Without the event, I'm not sure if we would have had the same number of folks come out on the project. The fact that the project was short and close to Denver was appealing and I think families enjoyed this as a way to get their child more involved with volunteering without a huge commitment.
We did a mini survey after this project (saved in the project file) that has some positive feedback from the flexible volunteering aspect of the project.
Special Notes: The volunteer hours were a bit tough to calculate, given that there were folks who did not enter their emails and some that did not sign out. Therefore, I averaged the time that was calculated and got about 2 hours per person. I then applied this to those who didn't sign out and also considered a driving time of 1 hour in total to Bluff Lake.
Stewardship Education:
Key Concerns or Comments from Staff or Volunteers:
Description of Accidents/Incidents:
Description of Work Completed:
