Reflecting on a Day of Service

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All around the King County, people came together to spend one day giving back to their communities. Last Friday Nature Consortium hosted 85 volunteers from Microsoft in honor of United Way’s Day of Caring. As the single largest day of service in Washington State, Day of Caring is always a big day for us. It was a lot of fun, and we covered a lot of ground (34,550 square feet!). It’s amazing to see the kind of impact you can have in one day when so many people get together.

The work

We spent the day doing maintenance on the Soundway site (also called our “14th & Holly” site, named after the location of one of the trailheads). For our crew leads and volunteers, that meant pulling up the smaller invasive plants that had started to grow in after we initially removed them. Himalayan blackberry is the biggest culprit on our site and in many urban forests. They have a massive root system and are a very persistent pest, so we spend a lot of time at our work parties trying to dig up as much of the root system as we can.

The people

As Outreach & Media Coordinator, I spent a lot of time talking with the volunteers, hearing their stories, and documenting our progress throughout the day. Check out the photos on our Facebook page! A lot of the people I talked to were folks who had volunteered with us for Day of Caring last year and were excited to come back again this year. Some of the folks who helped us with “initial removal” last year reminisced about how rewarding it felt to take down 6-foot-high blackberry canes and dig up huge root masses the size of yams (and sometimes as big as our heads!).

Thank you!

Overall, there was a lot of positive energy in the woods, and everyone left with a smile although we all were a little bit tired. All of us at Nature Consortium love participating in Day of Caring every year, and we’re fortunate to have such a great relationship with United Way and the volunteers from Microsoft. Thank you to everyone who helped make this a great event; we hope to see you back again next year!

Our next big event: Duwamish Alive! is coming next month on October 15th.