Most of the opportunities for habitat preservation/restoration in
our neighborhood is on privately owned land
(Our Approach).
Restoration of the public land also depends
heavily on volunteers.
Our pool of volunteers tend to have busy lives
(doesn't everyone these days).
Getting commitments for single blocks of time is practical;
getting commitments for continuing activities
is much more difficult.
Need: lower the threshold for participation
by identifying smaller
tasks that can be linked together,
but do not have critical scheduling requirements.
Problem areas:
Information: information needs to be very specific (customized)
to minimize the amount of research and decision-making
that the person needs to do.
Aside: I know multiple people who have deferred
(often indefinitely) purchases of item X
because there are too many choices to be considered
and the merchants are unwilling to help:
when faced with a long shelf full of boxes where they
have to read the blurbs on the boxes to figure out what
is available as a precursor to deciding what they want,
they say "later".
Materials: often locating and then purchasing the materials
is a major project in itself,
which may leave the person with no time to actually
plant them.
Informational articles:
Problem: much of the literature that I have found has
been written for the professional,
or serious amateur.
Need: information targeted at children:
Children are likely to be strong advocates
of these projects
Appropriate level?: probably
Middle School/Junior High School:
old enough to participate meaningfully
in such projects,
young enough to still be interested
Need: information in executive summary form for
parents to decide go/no-go on projects
(before looking for how-to information)
Need: in format that can be customized (localized) by various
sponsoring groups
Workshops - limited value
Our experience in other arenas is that workshops
for the neighborhood residents
are likely to have little value,
because participation is likely to be low.
This is not the type of activity where most people get
interested at the same time.
Rather people will become interested at different
time.
Interest is likely to slowly ripple through the neighborhood.
Need to have information available when people
become interested --
wait too long and they are likely to move on to other things
and never come back.
Workshops are good for training a core group,
who will then help other residents with the
harder questions and issues,
and serve as leaders for group activities.
Critical Mass for Student Activities
There are various student projects where schools could leverage
off each other,
and the more schools that participate,
the more interesting the project is for the students
(More Info)
Information Exchange
World Wide Web provides good means for distributing info
Timeliness: you can download info immediately,
rather than having to request it and wait for response
Search engines: help you find groups and documents
that you were previously unaware of
Improving retrieval:
Suggestion: create format (for example a keyword vocabulary)
to facilitate finding similar documents with
the various search engines.
Then include explicit reference to that format on your
pages so that other groups that find your pages can
adopt that format,
enable them to be found more easily by others.
Improve sharability:
Develop a copyleft
(:
from the
)
so that information can be shared freely without substantial
risk of it being "captured" by someone who then
asserts a restrictive copyright.
Media Relations
Share information (off-line) with similar groups to
increase each other's effectiveness in dealing with the media.
Which reporters are good on which topics.
Mix of following factors
assigned beat
priorities and personal preferences
background knowledge
key phrases to use in messages
so that they can easily spot your story
as one they are likely interested in.
Reason: Reporters get many messages,
and many are irrelevant or of low interest
and they need to quickly filter them down
to the most promising ones.
Do they have assistants who handle the initial screening
and story prep?
Packaging stories
A "hook" to hang the story on:
fit it into pattern of prevous stories
(for both reporter and readers)
Something unique or interesting
Having enough components available
Pithy quotes from appropriate people
Pictures: still and video
Like a headline or lead paragraph: must grab readers attention
and convey a significant portion of the top level of the story.
What elements should you have identified in advance and
made available
Funding
easier (small donations): visible items
moderate: installation
hard: professional services, maintenance
Similar Groups
Note:
If you are in a group that should be listed below,
send me (Webmaster)
the appropriate URL
and I will add it,
so that subsequent visitors can find you through us.
And, vice versa, we would appreciate a similar listing.
Local telephone numbers are included (where known and available)
in addition to links in case you are working from hard copy
or the organization's web page is unreachable.
Other groups engaged in protection/restoration of
natural (native) riparian (stream) habitats.
:
home page - no information posted about their project on Los Gatos Creek (as of April 1997)
Other groups engaged in protection/restoration of
natural (native) open woodland habitats (similar to the majority of Bol Park
and the rest of the neighborhood).
See Bay Area Action (BAA) above
Area groups engaged in protection/restoration of
other types of natural habitat or general habitat.
(in March 1998, its last-mod date was 04 Sept 1996)
Phone: (650) 494-9301 (in Palo Alto)
San Francisco Bay
Bird Observatory:
Phone: (408) 946-6548
Note: as of April 1998, these pages seem to no longer
be on the Web (several weeks of failures to connect).
Leaving links here for a while in case this is an interim problem.
(a.k.a. "The Refuge Committee")
("Refuge" = Don Edwards San Francisco Bay National Wildlife Refuge):
preserving the wetlands surrounding the bay.
Friends of the Estuary: Protecting, Restoring, Enhancing the San Francisco Bay-Delta Estuary
Trish Mulvey, Vice President
Environmental Education:
, Phone: (650) 424-8035 (in Palo Alto)
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