Refuge System Offers Revitalized Mentoring Program

The new Friends Partnership Mentoring Program envisions 30 events a year, with each of the nation’s approximately 220 Friends partnerships involved in one mentoring session in about every seven years. Increased funding and greater participation at the local level of the U.S. fish and Wildlife Service will achieve this dramatic increase in mentoring.  

Under the new plan, mentoring will focus on:

• Core management of the Friends organization (obtaining 501c3 status, developing bylaws and a board, fiscal operations, meeting effectiveness);
• Defining roles, responsibilities and scope of the partnership between a Friends organization and refuge staff;
• Dealing with board and staff change; and
• Revitalizing a partnership in decline or in danger of collapse.

The new program will strengthen Friends partnerships by building relationships and sound business practices between Friends organizations and National Wildlife Refuge System staff.

Under the new plan, there will be a standardized, online mentoring application. Mentor pairs will include one Service staff person and one Friends member. Fifteen pairs of mentors will receive training and commit to a three-year term, including two mentor visits annually for the first two years and then coaching new mentors during the third year.

In addition to traditional mentor site visits, there will be more peer-to-peer coaching between Friends groups; annual orientation sessions for Friends and staff; and expanded use of such online tools as RefugeFriendsConnect.org, online training through webinars and webcasts and the Friends National Wildlife Refuges Facebook group.

The new plan addresses a recommendation from the Refuge System’s Conserving the Future vision to “develop and nurture active and vibrant Friends groups or community partnerships for every staffed refuge or refuge complex.” 

This Week at Interior

Here’s what happened this week at Interior: a new Secretarial Order is issued to expand opportunities for youth and veterans to play, learn, serve, and work in America’s great outdoors; the White House honors 14 Champions of Change for engaging communities and youth in environmental stewardship and conservation; the Land Buy-Back Program continues to move forward under the Cobell Settlement, with more than $100 million in purchase offers to nearly 16,000 Oglala Sioux landowners; in advance of this year’s fire season Secretary Jewell visits the National Interagency Fire Center in Boise, ID; and a recap of the Secretary’s visit to Montana last weekend.

Wilderness at 50: A Remarkable Concept
Conservationists around the world are celebrating the 50th anniversary of the Wilderness Act of 1964. The law represents a half-century-long struggle that began with people like John Muir and culminated with people like Olaus Murie and Howard Zahniser.

Zahniser wrote the first draft in 1956. The journey of the Wilderness Act covers nine years, 65 rewrites and 18 public hearings before being signed into law by President Lyndon B. Johnson on Sept. 3, 1964.  The Wilderness Act established the National Wilderness Preservation System, which today includes 757 Congressionally-designated wilderness areas comprising about 109.5 million acres in 44 states and Puerto Rico.

“That a society would decide to set aside lands and waters and not actively manage them was a remarkable concept for a country founded on western socioeconomic traditions,” says National Wildlife Refuge System wilderness coordinator Nancy Roeper.

The U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service manages more than 20 million acres of wilderness in the Refuge System – about one-fifth of all the designated wilderness areas in the nation. There are 75 wilderness areas on 63 refuges in 25 states. The Service is one of four federal agencies with stewardship responsibilities; the others are the Bureau of Land Management, the U.S. Forest Service and the National Park Service.