Update from Cotati Creek Critters - our Carbon Offset Partner

Each year we donate generously to a local community-based organization that is restoring a local creek through tree-planting and other projects. We feel that this community based carbon offset balances our desire to mitigate the conference carbon impact and serve local needs. Join us.

From Jenny at Cotatit Creek Critters:
Meanwhile, I’d like to just let you know a little about some of our activities and achievements over the last year or so, since approximately the time of the last conference.

We have hosted approximately 22 Creek Stewardship Days including both regular events open to the public and special workdays for specific groups such as SSU and SRJC classes and clubs, Boy Scouts, community groups, homeschoolers, STRAW (Students & Teachers Restoring a Watershed, a project of the Bay Institute) with elementary school students from Thomas Page School, and others; and approximately another 12 smaller-scale “Prep” Daysand planting days to prepare materials and propagate plants.  Hundreds of volunteers helped to plant and take care of native trees, shrubs and understory plants alongside the Laguna de Santa Rosa in Cotati and a small section of Rohnert Park. We have been focusing particularly on planting native grasses, sedges, and rushes which will help to stabilize banks, reduce soil erosion, improve water quality, and provide wildlife habitat.  We also held a couple of bigtrash pick up days.  As always we like to emphasize that what we do in our everyday lives here in Cotati and Rohnert Park has an impact downstream throughout the rest of the Laguna de Santa Rosa, a biologically significant area and a local treasure.

We have continued to offer presentations, guided walks and field trips with local experts through our community education program, the Inside/Outside Nature Education series.  Topics have ranged from birds of California grasslands (a walk at Tolay Regional Park) to the miracle of soil, to gardening to conserve water and protect creeks.  We have collaborated with Sonoma County Wildlife Rescue for a field trip, and with the Leadership Institute for Ecology & the Economy for an evening investigating sustainable economics.  These events have been very successful with up to 60 people attending some of them. 

 Collaboration is the name of the game for much of what we do.  We have worked with Faculty at Sonoma State University to further develop our internship program for SSU students and others, and have had up to six interns working with us at any one time, giving them valuable hands-on experience in the field of restoration, and giving us much appreciated practical help.  Last summer we hosted a crew of young people from part of the county-wide Sonoma Youth Ecology Corps program, and more recently, work crews from Conservation Corps North Bay.  We have also partnered with sustainability organizationDaily Acts to support their work on water conservation in the City of Cotati, including helping to replace an irrigated green mini-park into a food forest with edible perennials and native plants.  We continue to work with our sponsors the Laguna de Santa Rosa Foundation, the Sonoma County Water Agency, and the City of Cotati.

 In October 2009 we were thrilled to finally see the installation of threeinterpretive signs alongside the Laguna in Cotati, a project that had been in the works for over two years.  We celebrated with an Open House and were delighted that Assemblyman Jared Huffman was able to join us to unveil the signs.

 We received quite a bit of recognition in 2009!  (This may be duplication from last year?!)  In March 2009 we received the Outstanding Environmental Education Award from the Sonoma County Conservation Coalition, an Environmental Volunteer award from SCAYD (Sonoma County Adult & Youth Development) and I was honored by the National Women’s History Project as one of 7 women in Sonoma County “taking a lead to save the planet”! Meanwhile our Stewardship Coordinator, Wade Belew, has now become President of the California Native Grasslands Association and is working to raise awareness of the significance of California native grasses and grasslands through presentations, field trips and guided walks as well as through Cotati Creek Critters restoration project.

I hope may be you can convey some of this information to others in the group if you think it would be useful.

Thank you very much for thinking of us – again!

Jenny