Many people love and care about endangered species such as panda bears, tigers, black rhinos and blue whales. But none of animals are native to Centre County. It can make locals feel like the only way they can contribute to conservation efforts is to donate money to conservation organizations doing work elsewhere.

But that’s not true! We have many valuable species to protect in our own community, including endangered species such as monarch butterflies. Community members need to be shown how they can make a huge difference to the environment through small actions that they can make – literally – in their own backyards.

Our project is focused on making Centre County more pollinator-friendly by encouraging community members to create pollinator-friendly habitat across Centre County.

We will operationalize this goal by broadening the scope of home garden pollinator habitat by creating pollinator-friendly gardening kits with seeds and locally specific and easy-to-follow growing information. The kits will be dispersed to local community members alongside high quality pollinator programming tailored to each audience.

Our project will have a tangible and lasting impact on the community by an increase in pollinator-friendly habitat that is individually managed by home gardeners. This dispersed strategy will encourage widespread habitat across Centre County. Our approach is different than a community garden as a central focal point, which would require a long-term commitment by a single organization (such as our club) to it manage into the future. Instead, our strategy will rely on individuals to manage the habitat in the long term, which they have a vested interest in because it is - literally – in their backyard!

We hope that this project has ripple effects across the community as neighbors share the new information (and seeds!) with neighbors. We will encourage this behavior on the information included in the kits.