Our volunteers rocked in 2015!

By Ilana DeBare
As we approach year’s end, it’s nice to take time to appreciate some of the wonderful things about 2015.
Like… our Golden Gate Bird Alliance volunteers.
The range of volunteer activities carried out by this organization is truly stunning. Our members lead bird walks… shepherd Eco-Ed students on field trips… staff the monthly speaker series… advocate for wildlife through our conservation committees…. organize Christmas Bird Counts and Birdathon events…
GGBA has a staff of just two full-time and four part-time people.
But we have more than 1,400 volunteers!
There are too many volunteers and too many volunteer accomplishments to list them all here. So I’ll just give a few snapshots.

Habitat Restoration

In habitat restoration alone, GGBA volunteers put in over 4,200 hours of work during 2015. That’s the equivalent of two people working full-time jobs for a year!
GGBA volunteers pitched in at eight different public sites, managed by agencies from federal to municipal, from the Golden Gate National Recreation Area to the Port of SF.
 
 

At Pier 94 in San Francisco alone, we had 973 volunteers who put in 2,207 hours – planting 1,480 native plants, removing 123 thirty-gallon bags of weeds, and 22 bags of trash as well as a discarded flat-screen TV, air mattress, and 17 tires.
(The Western Meadowlarks, American Avocets, and other birds that frequent Pier 94 were happy to have those tires gone!)
One hallmark of our habitat restoration work is that we mobilize people beyond our immediate membership. Volunteer coordinator Noreen Weeden reaches out to local organizatinos that are seeking some kind of fun community service – so our habitat volunteers in 2015 included groups from Salesforce, Twitter, Southwest Airlines, PWC, Wells Fargo Bank, University of the Pacific, Hayward High School, and Georgetown University Alumni, among many others.

We plan to issue an Annual Report in early January that will have lots more info on the wide range of things that our volunteers accomplished in the past year.
For now, though, I’d like to be a little selfish and highlight a few of the volunteers who made my life as Communications Director so much easier and more productive in 2015!

Steve Lombardi, Field Trip Coordinator

Where do the 150+ field trips that we offer each year come from? Yes, they start with our terrific field trip leaders. But someone has to contact those leaders, brainstorm with them about trip ideas, calendar each trip, and write up accurate descriptions for our web site and Field Trips e-newsletter. That person is Steve Lombardi.
We have one of the largest field trip programs of any Audubon chapter, and Steve smoothly manages it all with almost no involvement from GGBA staff. Plus he’s currently corralling some one-of-a-kind trips for our annual Birdathon, coming in April 2016!  I’m so grateful he does all this… and I wish our field trip participants knew how much work goes on behind the scenes to organize and schedule these great trips.

Krista Jordan, Twitter Diva

You’d think that GGBA would have jumped on social media with a birdy name like Twitter from the start. But our tiny staff meant that for a long time, we didn’t have time to really focus on tweeting. Then about 18 months ago, GGBA member Christopher Rieger volunteered to take over our Twitter feed. When he had to leave last summer, Krista Jordan leaped in to fill the gap.
With a day job managing communications and development for the John Muir Land Trust, and her weekends preoccupied with taking GGBA’s Master Birder class, you might think Krista wouldn’t have time to tweet for GGBA. Wrong! She brings a fun, friendly, informative voice to our Twitter feed. Check it out and follow us at @GGAudubon!

Pat Kirkpatrick, Travel Coordinator

Who runs a travel agency for fun in their spare time? Well, it’s not quite a travel agency, but Pat oversees our Travel with Golden Gate Bird Alliance program of expert-led tours to great birding venues such as Ecuador and South Africa. She combs the birding world for interesting destinations and great leaders, and works with them to craft trips that will appeal to GGBA members’ interests and budgets.
The travel program benefits both its participants (who experience whole new worlds of birding) but GGBA, which receives a portion of revenue from each trip. You may be looking in awe at a Resplendant Quetzal in Costa Rica…. but behind those brilliant feathers lies the hard work of Pat and her assistant, volunteer Rubi Abrams. (Click here to see some our exciting 2016 destinations, including Costa Rica, Southern Oregon, South Africa, South Texas, Oaxaca, and Amazonian Ecuador.)

Linda Vallee, Database Volunteer

Linda retired from her career in Information technology. at exactly the moment that GGBA acquired a new member database and (due to the recession) had to lay off the staff that would have managed it. Linda ably came to the rescue, using her retirement to help us sort out the tricky issues with our new software and keep better track of members.
This may sound wonky and boring… but believe me, it is essential. Linda’s like our unpaid I.T. guru. She sorts out the conflicts between our member list and the member list that National Audubon shares with us. (And there are a lot of conflicts!) If you’ve gotten a thank-you letter for a donation within the past year… that’s due to Linda, managing and printing out our donation acknowledgments.

And these are just four volunteers out of more than 1,400!

For the other 1,396+ of you…. We on the staff and board are so appreciative of the work you do. Your passion, skill, and dedication make the Bay Area a better place for birds… and for all of us.

THANK YOU! May you have happy holidays and a busy, fulfilling 2016!

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Become a volunteer in 2016! See our Volunteer web page for opportunities. In addition to the jobs listed there, we need people to help with Birdathon events and fundraising, office work, staffing information tables at community events, and more. Got special skills you’d like to share? Email Noreen at nweeden@goldengatebirdalliance.org.