Recognising our volunteers and donors: 2021 celebration

Posted on 23 December, 2021 by Ivan

We love our volunteers and donors and could not do what we do without them. Our management committee is run by volunteers, our monitoring programs rely on skilled citizen scientists, our landholders ensure landscape restoration is maintained, and others help with events, Landcare, engagement and in countless other ways. We appreciate their dedication to our vision of increasing, enhancing and restoring biodiversity across central Victoria.

With few opportunities for large grants to assist our projects, we have relied more and more on our volunteers, fundraising and donors, as well as diversifying our ‘fee for service’ model. We have been fortunate to receive generous donations from local families and organisations, which have supported our monitoring and restoration projects.

It was a great pleasure to host a humble thank-you celebration for our volunteers and larger donors on the evening of Wednesday 8 December 2021 at The Hub Plot, behind our office in Castlemaine, Victoria.

Although a chilly summer evening for central Victoria, we still enjoyed COVID-safe celebratory drinks and snack packs in the leafy Hub Plot garden. Our Monitoring Coordinator, Jess Lawton, provided a short summary of our monitoring achievements over the last year, followed by plenty of chatting and laughter. Thank you to everyone who came and made it a wonderful evening with great company. Special thanks to Lou, Jane R, Brendan and Duncan for setting up and helping the evening run smoothly, and to Heather and Neil for the lovely venue.

We are blessed to have an engaged and enthusiastic community who support us to check in on our local biodiversity, and deliver monitoring, engagement, Landcare support and landscape restoration across our region. If it wasn’t for your hard work, we simply would not be able to continue our valuable long-term biodiversity monitoring, engage our community in caring for our local landscapes, or empower landowners to manage their land as wildlife habitat.

To everyone who has helped Connecting Country in 2021: a big thank you! We are so grateful for your support and encouragement.

To find out more about volunteer and donation opportunities at Connecting Country, please – click here

Please enjoy the following photos by Lou Citroen, capturing the beauty of our volunteer celebration on a chilly summer’s evening in Castlemaine.