Community partnership fosters sustainability, stewardship
The Glacier Conservancy’s mission to preserve and protect Glacier National Park for future generations can only be accomplished through strong community partnerships. Again this year, the Conservancy is proud to be involved in the Great Fish Community Challenge; a program focused on exactly the kind of community building that makes the Flathead Valley such a special place to live, work, and play. This year, we’re inviting the community to support a special collaboration that we believe, and hope you will agree, represents the core values of community building as modeled by Great Fish.
As you know, Glacier Park serves as a significant economic driver for this area. At the same time, the park also provides a rich variety of educational opportunities for students, teachers, and schools. As the park’s philanthropic partner, the Conservancy supports numerous opportunities for students of all ages to experience Glacier as an outdoor classroom. These experiences not only teach students about the ecology, geology, and wildlife of the park, they serve to foster the life-long values needed for stewardship and conservation of our wild places.
In an effort to continue expanding these opportunities, the Glacier Conservancy, Glacier National Park’s Native Plant Nursery and Whitefish School District have formed an innovative partnership that will translate the values of stewardship and conservation into applied community-based skills. The Center for Sustainability and Entrepreneurship (Center) was established in the Whitefish School District through input from students and staff about the need to provide hands on learning experiences for K-12 students in sustainable energy, agriculture, forestry, natural resources, and entrepreneurship.
Sitting on three acres, the Center is the first net zero energy facility of its kind in Montana with a two-story classroom and an attached four-season greenhouse. Outside spaces are being transformed into a production garden, food forest, orchard, wetland, native forest, and outdoor classroom, with the goal of providing a living laboratory in which students can learn and experience sustainability in a variety of forms.
This community collaboration will enhance a program, launched this year as a pilot project, that has the park’s Native Plant Nursery staff working closely with students to apply skills learned at the Center to the benefit of daily operations in native plant restoration within the park. In addition, funding from contributions to this project through Great Fish Community Challenge will support an annual internship for one student from Whitefish Schools to work alongside the nursery staff learning on-the-job skills firsthand, and to grow this impactful educational and community building opportunity.
The Whitefish Community Foundation’s Great Fish program gives voice to important projects like this one that help us create a bright and sustainable future for our families, communities, and special places. Only through community engagement and individual financial support are creative projects like this one possible. To learn more, or to contribute, go to whitefishcommunityfoundation.org. Together, we can make this bold idea to invest in an educational collaboration that will help preserve and protect this place we love.
— Lacy Kowalski is Grants and Projects Manager at Glacier National Park Conservancy. Ryder Delaloye is Director of Curriculum, Assessment and Professional Development at the Whitefish School District.