From the Director’s Notebook: Today’s Saplings are Tomorrow’s Forest
Photo courtesy of Stacey Gray
by Sarah Marley, FOW Interim Executive Director
Recently, on a perfect, crisp fall morning, I stepped out with our field team and volunteers to close out planting season at Friends of the Wissahickon’s (FOW) Halloween Service Day.
Installing native trees and shrubs restores the forest and provides a home for the park’s fauna. Even with jobs as important as those, it manages to mean so much more.
It’s old friends coming together, with their hands in the dirt reminding each other that there’s more to life than the daily grind. It’s children fostering a relationship to the natural world and the places they’ll call home even when they move very far away. It’s an in-person connection when the world needs it most.
I’m proud that after 101 years, FOW is still providing a roadmap for our community to step out and step up for the conservation of this important resource. Make twice the impact this Giving Tuesday, December 2, when your donation is matched by a group of generous donors up to $20,000!
Stepping out is the easy part. I meet so many wonderful park visitors each year whose love stories began on a bench somewhere in the Wissahickon, where the world stopped for a little while and just long enough. We hear from parents that after a family-hike through the park with Hike+Heal, that the Wissahickon is an every-weekend-sort-of-thing now.
The actions we take here, today, will impact millions for years to come. This planting season’s saplings is the next generation’s forest. At every service day, FOW’s volunteers are stepping up for people they may never meet; improving drinking water for more than 300,000 Philadelphians, improving our air quality, and restoring and beautifying Wissahickon Valley Park so the City has a place to make memories for centuries to come.
And you can too. This holiday season, give the gift that gives back with a one-time donation or a sustaining membership to Friends of the Wissahickon so we can continue this important work all year long.
Don’t take our word for it, take Kevin Berkoff’s: FOW board member and sustaining member.
Nonprofits like Friends of the Wissahickon require a broad base of support—all year long—to ignite and sustain our ambitious capital projects, free engagement programs, and essential habitat work. That’s where our 3,000 members come in.
Members can choose to give once annually, or monthly, through FOW’s sustainer program, which debuted in 2019. One sustaining member, FOW board member Kevin Berkoff, likens his donation each month to a subscription to the outdoors.
“The Wissahickon has been a part of my life for the past 45 years, and almost daily at this point,” said Kevin.
The West Mt. Airy resident has no shortage of memories of Wissahickon Valley Park. While attending Germantown Academy, he ran the trails, went canoeing in the creek, and even studied the park’s aquatic wildlife in science class. Today, Kevin is a science teacher at Penn Charter. He makes great use of the school’s proximity to the park, bringing his environmental science and biology students into nature’s classroom. “It’s a great teaching tool as well,” said Kevin. “We have an environmental certificate program where a lot of kids do service, and they always ask what they can do [to fulfill service hours] and I say, ‘every Saturday you can go out with FOW!’”
After spending countless hours in the Wissahickon hiking with his family, mountain biking, birding, and even fly-fishing, Kevin got acquainted with FOW’s work in the park and was soon connected to the organization at the board level.
His sustaining membership enables FOW’s stewardship of the trails, keeping them passable for all user groups, including mountain bikers. It powers habitat restoration, fostering a vibrant bird population for all to observe and enjoy, and supports an ongoing commitment to clean rivers and creeks that support fish and fly fishers alike.
What will your sustaining membership do? Become a sustainer today.