By Bruce Ross, Executive Director bross@wisducks.org
This article originally appeared in Wisconsin Waterfowl Association’s June, 2022 Newsletter edition.
WWA’s historic project map – your support will help us get more projects on the ground!
Over the three years that I’ve been associated with WWA, I’ve been presented with many opportunities to help our organization have a greater impact. We have taken advantage of several of them:
- re-structuring the board of directors to better align with our missions,
- expanding outreach efforts to identify and accomplish more wetland projects,
- getting the duck stamp adjustment “across the finish line”,
- establishing and executing the successful Waterfowl Hunters EXPO,
- initiating a long term planned giving program for long term sustainability, and
- protoyping a corporate habitat partnership that allows us to do more restoration projects, among many others.
And we have some exciting initiatives coming including a substantial NexGen waterfowling grant and the expansion of our wetland restoration capacity to focus on huntable, public lands restorations. Both of these will be a big deal for WWA. I’m proud of what we’re accomplishing together.
We’ve been able to move these initiatives forward in large part because we’ve been able to attract the right volunteer talent and energy to the right opportunity. I wrote about this in the last newsletter, “Finding the Right Fit – Second Time Around”.
But there are so many other substantial opportunities that just seem to slip by. I lament each lost opportunity, and that causes me to reflect on why we haven’t been able to grasp them. That reason frequently comes down to funding.
So, much like the ‘finding the right fit…” articles attempted to match volunteer interest with organizational need, the table below lays out organizational opportunities that lack only the right financial support in the hopes it will interest a private or corporate sponsor to explore the opportunities with us – some small, some big. Expect to see this list change as new opportunities are identified.
| Category | Title |
Description |
| Organizational | Part-time Grant writer | All WWA programs would benefit from a part-time grant writer—to find and screen grants, then develop proposals to expand all of our mission programs. This is an opportunity to initially fund a part-time position, then allow received grants to fund it into the future. |
| Website re-build | We love the wealth of information on our website, but it is dated and more than a little clunky. We want to share the credit with a business that could help us out by bringing it into this century! | |
| Major gift coordinator | WWA must diversify its funding streams to expand from the grassroots, event-based revenue, and build upon its increasingly program-focused funding opportunities. This part-time position would work with private, foundation and corporate entities to underwrite WWA’s worthwhile missions. | |
| Telling the WWA story | Our 38-year history, our habitat programs, the passion of our volunteers, our successes and more warrant capturing and sharing in a compelling way. While we have focused on getting the job done rather than telling our story, increasingly, our ability to excite the passions of our members, sponsors, landowners, policy makers will benefit from creative, multi-media story telling. | |
| Habitat | Wild rice program coordinator | WWA wants to expand our re-seeding (or initial seeding) in the backwaters that can benefit from this duck magnet plant. This is a part-time position that would work with partners to identify locations and volunteer seeding crews, then coordinate rice supply and distribution. An opportunity to expand WWA’s habitat work more fully across the northern part of the state! |
| Wood Duck Box Program sustainment | We have a solid volunteer team managing this successful program, but we are on the lookout for a program sponsor who can help us with the costs of manufacturing the kits and boxes. More ducklings on the ground in spring, means more ducks in the sky this fall. And it’s an opportunity to engage all ages in a worthy environmental project! | |
| AWA Program coordinator | This is one of our most engaging programs that allows volunteers to make a personal habitat difference in the off-season. While it started as a program on DNR lands, we have expanded it to include private and public lands, depending on volunteer interests and land availability. A part-time coordinator will expand this program state-wide, and grow WWA in the process! | |
| Public wetland restoration ecologist | We are working with the DNR to identify opportunities to expand our recognized small scale wetland restoration program onto their publicly-accessible properties. We need to provide only 25% of funding to leverage against the DNR’s Pittman-Robertson funding. $1 yields $4 for a great ROI! | |
| Corporate project partners | Working with Wisconsin-based corporations, we’ve been able to accomplish more or bigger projects, while giving those corporations some love for the habitat work we are doing together. Associate your brand with the positive environmental impacts your dollar can bring! | |
| Project database & GIS applications | We are working with volunteers to develop important but basic SW applications that make our habitat projects more efficient…. But there are some fundamental costs to supporting this necessary technology! | |
| Educational | EXPO sustaining / title sponsor | The EXPO is off to a great start, but will need to be increasingly “professionalized” in the years ahead to sustain it and really deliver on its potential as Wisconsin’s only waterfowling focused immersive experience. And any excess funds go to in-state projects or waterfowl education! |
| R3 coordination | Passing our waterfowling traditions to the NexGen at scale demands a management focus that is tough to achieve exclusively through volunteers. Program coordination at the state-level means we could scale our successful, but small-scale Learn to Hunt programs across the state! | |
| Policy | Grassroots engagement – software licensing | We want to amplify the voices of our 7,000 + members for policy issues important to waterfowling, by making it easy for our members to ‘reach out and touch’ policy-makers. Proprietary software programs can help us, but they cost a couple thousand dollars/ year. |