How You Can Help Getting This Fledgeling Chapter Off The Ground
How You Can Help Getting This Fledgeling Chapter Off The Ground
by: Mike Azevedo
We’re brand new! There was a time when the North San Joaquin Chapter of the CNPS was the
largest in the valley. This really says something when you consider that the valley includes
Sacramento which now has a big, well run and organized group of its own.
Many of you are, no doubt, as excited as we are about the possibilities with this new chapter and you
are wondering how you can help. So, with this, our first edition of the new “The Oak Branch”, it only
seems fitting that we should start out with an article about how to get involved!
The first thing to keep in mind is that our board, so far, is still incomplete. Our acting president, CeCe
Hurst, is taking the reigns to get us started. Our outgoing president, Jim Brugger should know how
much we appreciate his keeping the lights on, so to speak, when things started to slow down. He’s
stepped down as president but is still giving presentations and imparting his knowledge on native
plants and assisting us as we start things up again.
Mike Azevedo is our Membership Chair. You may have already heard from him. Cynthia Typaldos is
putting together our presentation series, the fruits of which you will see further down in this edition.
This brings us to the positions that are currently unfilled. We could use a vice chair, secretary,
volunteer coordinator, event chair, conservation chair, field trip chair, project chair, event tabling chair
and so on. And any of these may end up being committees so as to spread the burden. If you are
interested in serving on any of these committees, please let us know.
Volunteers are super important to an organization like this and a volunteer coordinator could
contribute greatly. We hope to be able to field crews of volunteers to help with creating new native
gardens and maintaining those that already exist. A volunteer coordinator could keep track of people
who have offered to help so everyone knows where help is needed.
Another big need is for coordination of events, field trips, work projects and tabling events. All of
these are super important to our goals and developing these things could take a committee and good
leadership.
And a conservation committee that can help develop long term goals for the valley, determine which
native plants make good local landscape decisions and advocate at city council meetings, planning
commission meetings, and other public landscape decision makers.
We also want to develop ways to propagate local native plants. We can sell them for fundraising, or
even give them away to be sure they are readily accessible to everyone. Native plant propagation is
fun and rewarding. We hope to educate people on how to do it so our members can raise these
plants in their yards for participation in native plant sales in the future, or giveaways at events.
And of course, there are so many service organizations, garden clubs, scout organizations and even
school groups out there who could use some knowledge on the importance of native plants, host
plants for local butterflies and moths.
This is a new newsletter and as such, we need your help with content here as well. For example, if
you have stories or photos of your native plant adventures, we’d love to include them. You can
submit articles as well.
One of our long-time members, Rhonda Allen, has already written quite a few articles that you will
see here. She envisions a regular article on current wildflowers, on select native plants, perhaps a
different one each edition, and with the wealth of knowledge she’s developed through her founding
work at the La Loma Native Garden, we have a lot to learn from her.
We also have a Facebook page which can also use photos and information about local native plant
events.