By Bruce Ross
This article appeared in the Wisconsin Waterfowl Association’s November 2025 Newsletter edition.
While revenue from members and chapter events has remained roughly consistent for several years, WWA’s impact within its missions has grown substantially. The fuel powering this growth is primarily WWA’s improved ability to identify and successfully apply for grant funding.
WWA is currently managing grants totaling $2,877,380 from our federal, state, and private-sector partners—that’s up over 700% in the past 7 years. Over 95% of those grants are focused on WWA’s habitat mission. These include grants to:
- Undertake projects (such as the Little Yellow River initiative, pictured above),
- Fund engineering studies (e.g., Jackson Marsh),
- Support the monitoring of uplands and wetlands (NRCS initiative), and
- Review and undertake restorations on state lands (under agreement with the WDNR).
This funding is focused on doing the habitat work important to state waterfowlers. In fact, that is the lens through which WWA considers seeking a grant or not: Is the grant’s purpose consistent with WWA’s mission to serve Wisconsin’s waterfowlers?
Your membership dollars and donations are the “seed money” necessary to acquire these grants. Without the WWA staff (underwritten by your contributions) to identify potential grants, develop applications, and then manage any grants received, our habitat efforts would be minuscule compared to the substantial impact we are having today.
More members and donations = more grants = more habitat work
At the risk of sharing more than you want to know about such things, funding acquired from one grant source can be applied as “match” to acquire additional funding from other grant sources. Granters like to see that partner contributions are involved in projects they consider underwriting.
For example, some of the $1 million in funding WWA received from the US Fish and Wildlife Service to undertake the Little Yellow River initiative was used as “match” to acquire an additional $200,000 in state duck stamp funding for that project. And that state funding will be used as a match to apply for an additional $200,000 in North American Wetlands Conservation Act (NAWCA) funding. It is in such ways that a member dollar can be turned into 3-4 dollars for work critical to the future of waterfowling.
