SUSTAINABILITY COMMUNITY FELLOW
Pittsburgh Parks Conservancy
Pittsburgh Parks Conservancy
In anticipation of August always being a hot month, there were very few outdoor activities planned to take place. In turn, that meant I had time to buckle down in the office and achieve some great strides in completing tasks that were set out as main objectives for me at the beginning of my fellowship. I created a site numbering system for the Urban EcoSteward (UES) program, which will help us to not only keep track of paper files, but also make the transition to a geodatabase, which will link our GIS files and Excel files together, easier. I facilitated a meeting of the UES park coordinators, explaining the changes to the system and working towards establishing more unified methods of recordkeeping across all of the parks. We also discussed keeping better track of the materials that we plant on the UES plots so we know not only what is being planted, but what is surviving and thriving. I am hoping that by the time I am finished, there will be several measures in place to help quantify just how successful the program has been since it started in 2005. Some other highlights of the month:
August 16: Facilitated volunteer event planning meeting to discuss volunteer opportunities and resources for the fall season. Due to a lack of TreeVitalize funding, we will not be able to do as many activities as we had initially hoped to do, but we will still keep busy anyways.
August 20: Introduction to volunteering with the PPC with freshmen from Carnegie Mellon University- We worked with 27 students, mostly incoming freshmen, to explain what the PPC does in Schenley Park, give them an overview of watersheds, and do invasive vine removal along the trails.
August 26: Urban EcoSteward meeting- presented hard work that I did, worked with coordinators to figure out next steps with the program
Also, that afternoon I represented the PPC on a conference call with the Urban Ecology Collaborative education working group, a regional collection of environmental educators who communicate with each other to share information. This call was focused on model sharing of evaluation methods. I shared how we evaluated our high school UES program and gathered feedback for how to improve results, as well as other methods to use in the future.
SCA COMMUNITY VOLUNTEER DAY
On August 21, the Green Cities fellows helped to put on a volunteer event focusing on the Hazelwood neighborhood. We worked with Hazelwood Urban Gardens (HUGs), the Hazelwood Food Forest permaculture project, and installed rain barrels on the Hazelwood Initiative building. Including our group, we had close to 40 volunteers come out to work for three hours with us on these projects. We made great progress on both the gardens and food forest and were able to demonstrate how to construct and install rain barrels. We had perfect weather for the day and everyone who came out had a great time. It was great to see the culmination of the Green Cities outreach and coordination efforts to put this day together.
