Today is Giving Tuesday, and we’re thrilled to celebrate a productive year of Stewarding In Place with you.
When you donate today, your gift will be doubled thanks to a $20,000 matching fund! We still have $9,300 in matching funds and $9,300 more to raise to reach our $40,000 goal!
One of our most popular Steward In Place offerings has been our BYOB virtual workshops. When 80 people tuned in to our first BYOB event on a Friday night in May, we knew we were on to something. We’ve recently expanded the effort with a BYOB webpage that features our newly produced BYOB how-to videos and upcoming workshops.
Steward In Place!
We loved hearing back and seeing photos of people’s Steward In Place projects! Paula R shared, “I was so excited after the Build Your Own Basin workshop that, armed with my WMG design, I went out ahead of schedule to draw my outline and strategize on my very first basin! Thanks to the generosity of some volunteers I met on prior Co-op Workshops, I have a good start to a basin today! I've got rock work to finish, but I'm pleased that I now have an on-site model to learn from.”
Schoolyard BYOB
Although many of us are stuck inside, or working on our own out-door projects, just think of the children! When Joaquin Murrieta-Saldivar, WMG’s Cultural Ecologist, realized that kids wouldn’t be able to enjoy on-campus learning, he knew he had to do something. After brainstorming with Drachman-Montessori teacher Eric Flewelling, they realized if they couldn’t bring the kids to the rain garden, they would bring the rain gardens to them with BYOB kits!
Since August, Joaquin, Eric, and several other teachers have been brainstorming how to engage students in water-harvesting projects outside of the classroom. Students will attend a virtual class with their teacher, receive handouts, pick up a BYOB kit—consisting of native trees and shrubs, wildflower seed balls, and mulch—and harvest the rain! Several schools—Drachman-Montessori and City High—are on track to begin implementing Build Your Own Basin projects this month. This 3-minute video with Joaquin and students shows you how easy it can be to BYOB!
Eric says, "There is so much value in students creating truly sustainable systems themselves. There's nothing like standing under the cool canopy of a big beautiful happy wastewater-fed tree in a rain garden you designed and created. I've seen it with my students... the next thing you know, they're educating their parents and working on a basin at home together!”
BYOB Kits
Check out one of our new BYOB kits in my video. These kits are a simple way to spread more water-harvesting basins and shade trees across Tucson. We’ll be getting BYOB kits out to K-12 students partnering with teachers as well as distributing kits to families in underserved neighborhoods. We want to ensure everyone can harvest rainwater as a free resource from Mother Nature to grow shade trees and native beauty in our yards.
For Tucson area folks, a donation of $100 will allow you to take home a BYOB kit for yourself or give one as a gift! The kit includes a native shade tree, wildflower seeds, a large bag of organic mulch, and WMG’s first-ever zine with step-by-step instructions on BYOB to get you started.
Your donation will help us reach our $40,000 goal and ensure we can continue to provide free, bilingual educational resources for everyone.
Thank you for joining our BYOB movement!
In gratitude,
Lisa Shipek
Executive Director
