Significant commitment.
Profound impact.
During a period of significant change at Audubon and across the country, your inspirational giving has helped bring to life a more inclusive, more innovative conservation paradigm.
Organizational transformation at scale requires significant time and resources. It also requires visionary leadership to look at what is and to imagine what could be—the type of leadership you’ve always demonstrated.
Maggie, thank you for your enduring support for conservation, for birds, and for Audubon. Your generosity and leadership have been instrumental in creating a new vision for Audubon, creating spaces for new voices in the world of conservation, and ensuring we can all work together to protect our shared and precious planet.
Since 2016, the Walker Fellows program has imbued Audubon with new perspectives, new talents, and new energy from tomorrow’s rising conservation leaders. The latest class of Walker Fellows is a diverse group with expertise in film, marketing, and storytelling; they are supported by an increasingly robust mentorship structure—and by the guidance of several graduates of the program, who remain with Audubon in other positions.
For the first time, in 2021 and 2022 we extended the length of the Walker Fellowship positions to six months. We have always encouraged Fellows to undertake substantive projects that spring from the intersection of their own skills, their passion for conservation, and Audubon’s mission to protect birds and the places they need. A longer timeframe provides Fellows with a more substantive training experience and allows them to contribute meaningfully through these types of more time-intensive, deeper, self-driven efforts.
We also created new opportunities for mentorship and support to benefit all of Audubon’s interns, apprentices, and fellows—and each of the latest class of Walker Fellows independently volunteered to participate. Led by Elaine O’Sullivan, Audubon’s director of network support and education, this initiative is designed to ensure that those who are new to Audubon have the guidance, training, and support structures they need to find their footing quickly, build friendships and networks within the organization, and make the most of their experience.
Walker Fellows Class of 2021
Your support for our Centers is powering local programs around the country, with a growing focus on grassroots and community leadership.
Throughout the COVID-19 pandemic, staff at Audubon Centers have been extremely successful at stimulating program innovation. In many ways, the pandemic has increased communities’ desire to spend time—safely—together and in nature. Our staff demonstrated outstanding flexibility and perseverance, not only in shifting activities to remote contexts, but also in facilitating modified programming that prioritized the health of our visitors while still enabling active in-person engagement.
Your gift also provided the fuel for a broad-based assessment of our Centers strategy—an ongoing process that will position us to better integrate local community needs with an enhanced theory of change.
As we encourage growth at the local level, we are also identifying and nurturing programs with scalable potential: programs that can be uniquely Audubon across the nation. However, as you know, it’s not enough to ask people to come up with good ideas for innovative offerings. In a national network like ours, it takes resources to put these plans into action. In 2021 we received nine grant proposals totaling $538,985, with an additional $577,200 of proposed match funds. Six of the proposals were accepted.
Maggie Walker Centers Incentive Fund Grantees 2021
Honoring Our Roots
Following their recent designation by the National Park Service as an Underground Railroad Trail to Freedom site, staff at the Audubon Center and Sanctuary at Francis Beidler Forest are working to build the partnerships, skills, and competency to better interpret the difficult history of the site as part of their efforts to advance equity, diversity, inclusion, and belonging. With 1,000+ years of unchanged, old-growth forest surrounding the boardwalk, Beidler Forest can play a unique role in sharing this history.
Engaging Native Landowners
Over the past several years, Spring Creek Prairie Audubon Center has forged partnerships with the Ponca and Winnebago Tribes to implement bird-friendly conservation practices and grow engagement with Indigenous populations. We now aim to expand these relationships to bring Plants for Birds to one of the few remaining remnants of tallgrass prairie, to assist with community projects on tribal lands, and to expand the use of Spring Creek Prairie Audubon Center by first peoples.
Forging Pathways from the Classroom to Careers in Conservation
Following on the success of the Tenacious Roots teen afterschool program, Seward Park Audubon Center seeks to launch a new Elevation program that will engage an even broader swath of young people. The program will create cohorts in six schools in the Puget Sound area, empowering students to plan and execute their own conservation projects while connecting with environmental professionals as they grow their understanding of careers in conservation.
Bringing Wild Indigo to the Heart of Columbus
Grange Insurance Audubon Center is partnering with colleagues in the Great Lakes office to expand the Wild Indigo program to the Columbus community. Located within the 120-acre Scioto Audubon Metro Park, the Center is a critical resource for the surrounding community, offering access to nature, educational programming, and art exhibitions for people of all ages in the heart of downtown Columbus. Wild Indigo is a program focused on thoughtfully engaging diverse and underestimated communities in conservation issues that are relevant and impactful in their everyday lives.
Reaching Diverse Communities in the Southwest
Rio Salado Audubon Center is also partnering with colleagues in the Great Lakes office to expand the Wild Indigo program to the Phoenix community. The new Rio Salado Wild Indigo program will explore partnership and engagement opportunities in the immediate South Phoenix vicinity, where they plan to help address the barriers and lack of awareness that make natural spaces and environmental careers inaccessible to communities of color and begin to dismantle perceptions that nature, stewardship, and environmental careers are not for them.
Welcoming New Fellows
The two Audubon Centers in California—Richardson Bay Audubon Center & Sanctuary and the Audubon Center at Debs Park—are teaming up to create a new Community Conservation Fellowship program. This multi-landscape and dual-center fellowship will launch two young adults’ conservation careers and provide young people in two urban centers with volunteerism and advocacy experience.
Incentive Fund Overview
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Inspired by your example, the board set aside $1 million in fiscal year 2021 to help position Jamaal Nelson, our new chief equity, diversity, and inclusion officer, for success. In addition to the board’s commitment, the development team has raised nearly $950,000 toward our EDIB initiatives.
Of the $1 million dedicated by the board, we have disbursed just over $650,000. The majority of these funds were used to support activities such as the hiring and onboarding process for Jamaal, investments in human resources, and staff training.
We are currently in the process of determining how best to deploy the additional funds resulting from the fundraising development team’s efforts. These activities could include expanding the size of our EDIB team through strategic hiring, supporting a “train the trainer” model that will allow us to efficiently share EDIB principles and strategies across our broad network, and making a deeper investment in environmental justice work through partnerships with influential leaders and organizations whose goals mirror our own.
This commitment represents an important step in making EDIB a true priority for our organization.
For a more comprehensive overview of Audubon’s latest efforts in this area, please see the 2022 EDIB Report.