It will be a year this March since I stood onstage at the Local Hero Awards and promised that the Bay Nature community would help shape the organization’s future. We asked to hear your thoughts and ideas through surveys, focus groups, and conversations, then listened to your responses.
Collectively, you told us that Bay Nature is more than a magazine. It nourishes those who identify with nature in the San Francisco Bay Area. From these pages, a community grows.
With this understanding, Bay Nature will begin to offer more opportunities to experience our stories together after reading them, deepening our connections with local nature and each other. We’ll take more hikes to explore habitats and ecosystems. Conduct more forums to speak with experts in the field. And visit more project sites where cutting-edge work occurs.
Current magazine subscribers, such as yourself, will be referred to, going forward, as founding members of the Bay Nature community. Rest assured that the Bay Nature magazine you know and love isn’t changing. Rather, you can expect to see more of our stories brought to life.
Bay Nature’s 14th Local Hero Awards event is April 7 in Berkeley, and I invite you to read the profiles of our inspiring honorees in this issue. Dr. Katharyn Boyer, Yakuta Poonawalla, Kellyx Nelson, and Naji Lockett are doing the important work of caring for people and our natural world.
Even as we recognize our community leaders, the Local Hero Awards also celebrate all of you and the efforts by individuals, organizations, and agencies around the area to make local nature and environmental issues tangible parts of daily life. Gathering each year at the Local Hero Awards reminds us that there is nature everywhere. It is common ground that binds us.
Let’s keep exploring nature together in print, online, and outdoors. I hope you will join us in growing and enriching an essential San Francisco Bay Area nature community whose ideas and stewardship are shaping a more equitable and sustainable future for us all.
Please visit BayNature.org/membership or write to me at wes@baynature.org with any questions about Bay Nature’s new membership program.
Sign up today!
