Celebrating Earth Day with Four CFSA CORE Grant Recipients

Happy Earth Day, Southern Arizona! For 50 years, Earth Day has engaged a billion people worldwide, inspiring individuals and communities to spend time outdoors, create meaningful connections with nature, and work to preserve our precious ecosystems. Help us celebrate today by congratulating four of CFSA’s 2020 CORE Grant recipients working to celebrate and protect our unique environment!

Borderlands Restoration Network fosters ecological and cultural place-based learning and leadership, restores and supports healthy, regenerating water sources and flourishing plant and animal communities, and supports prosperous borderland communities by expanding a vibration restoration economy. Their educations program includes Water is Life, a collaborative program with the Baboquivari High School (BHS) on the Tohono O’odham Nation. BHS students were hired to work after-school with conservation professionals to design and install rain-water harvesting, native-plant, and heritage food garden on campus. 

The Cooper Center for Environmental Learning (Camp Cooper) has provided memorable daytime and overnight experiences to over 130,000 children for over 50 years. These programs help increase ecological understanding and deepen lifelong connections with nature. The Cooper Center’s Earth Education programs include multi-day, overnight, full, and half-day programs for K-8 students that help, “people of all ages live more harmoniously and joyously with the natural world.”

Sky Island Alliance protects and restores the diversity of life and lands in the Sky Island regions of the U.S and Mexico, ensuring a place where nature thrives, open space and clean water are available to all, and people are connected to the unique region. Among Sky Island Alliance’s conversation programs is the Aravaipa Habitat Project in which volunteers are bringing back a lost native plant community along the banks of Aravaipa Creek in the Galiuro Mountains in Southern Arizona.

Watershed Management Group develops community-based solutions to ensure the long-term prosperity of people and the health of the environment. By providing people with the knowledge, skills, and resources for sustainable livelihoods, Watershed Management Group envisions a world where the relationship between communities and the environment creates prosperity for all. Among their diverse classes, professional services, and advocacy offerings is a group of individuals who work together to, “restore Tucson’s heritage of flowing creeks and rivers,” in a “collective movement to conserve water, recharge our aquifer, and restore the Sonoran Desert.”

We are extremely grateful for the hard work and dedication of these organizations and all those in our community working to preserve and restore our collective home.

Learn more about additional 2020 CORE Grant Recipients here.