San Diego Audubon Society, April 24, 2008, by Mel Hinton, President SDAS
In December of 2006 the San Diego Audubon Society was awarded a grant by Audubon California to develop a California version of National Audubon's Audubon at Home program. This was to be a collaborative effort with Palos Verdes Audubon and Santa Clara Valley Audubon. Our chapter was responsible for creating a brochure, PowerPoint program and workshop curriculum.
The California Audubon at Home program was introduced to the chapters at the Audubon California Assembly in October of 2007. The workshop -- Audubon at Home: Gardening for Birds and Butterflies: Creating a Wildlife Habitat in your Backyard -- was very well received and attended. The workshop included a version of the PowerPoint program used in San Diego Audubon's healthy garden workshops. Workshop attendees received a CD of the PowerPoint program and all attendees at the assembly received a copy of the newly printed Audubon at Home brochure in their welcome packet.
The SDAS grant had a budget of $4,490.
Brochures
About 6,000 of the brochures were printed for $1440, an average cost of 24 cents each. Roughly 3500 have been distributed. SDAS will retain about 1300 with the balance to be distributed by Audubon California. The CD that has the brochure and logo on it (Audubon at Home Brochure1/08) is of high quality and designed to be used by commercial printers. (Most home computers cannot open the file.)
Note: Printed brochures and/or Adobe InDesign files are available for adaptation (i.e. your logo) available on request from ggeorge@audubon.org.
Workshops
The four workshops conducted by SDAS consisted of two sessions, each session lasting about 2 hours. This was a hands-on, how-to-do-it, program that included numerous handouts and a lot of time devoted to questions and answers. The first two workshops were free, but the last two required a $30 fee to attend. The outlines for the workshops and a "Lessons Learned" summary sheet are included in the attachments. Each student received a free 1-gal native plant -- retail price about $7 -- and a demonstration planting was conducted on site.
SDAS has given several presentations on the AAH program to garden clubs, libraries and even the California Native Plant Society. Additionally, there are numerous opportunities to do AAH tabling at various garden festivals and flower shows. People are interested in water conservation using native plants and these venues are also a good way to promote the AAH workshops and Audubon in general.
Attachments: Workshop and garden glass outlines and handouts
PowerPoint
The PowerPoint CD has a large number of slides (78) which will allow chapters to pick and chose those that fit their needs. For an outreach presentation, only 35- 40 slides will be needed, but for a workshop more should be used. The Slide List attachment gives more details on the program and a brief description of the content of each slide. A person reasonably familiar with native plants should be able to use the program and craft it to a specific audience. Naturally, each chapter is encouraged to add material of their own.
Note: CD of Power Point presentation available from ggeorge@audubon.org upon request.
