GINLC Newsletter: Reflections from the President

We hope you're enjoying summer and finding some quality time outdoors with friends, family or some of our alfresco creatures. Put your feet up and take a little break-we all need to do that sometimes. The Conservancy had an exceptionally busy Spring. Things went into high gear for the weekend of April 19th and 20th when our members participated in both the island Clean-Up sponsored by the Kiwanis and the River Clean-Up by Friends of the Detroit River.

On Sunday, we hosted our annual Earth Day celebration at the Centennial Farm. The rain held off so that we could enjoy a delightful walk in the woods to learn about the diversity of trees there, as well as a little history of the farm. Thanks to Terry Laesser, we were again fortunate to have the wonderful high school volunteers from Riverside Academy in Dearborn. The young women helped with several games for the children and led interesting hands-on demonstrations bringing to life the importance of wetlands to a healthy ecosystem. The program ended with an engaging show on Birds of Prey presented by the Howell Nature Center. Since the event was advertised in the Detroit Free Press, we had many off-island visitors, including a couple who came from Livonia.

A few days later, Margarete Hasserodt assisted with planting trees at each of our Grosse Ile elementary schools for Earth Day. Several weeks later, in partnership with the Grosse Ile Recreation Department we sponsored a hands-on tree planting workshop at Centennial Farm. If you missed the class, you can find tree planting tips at our website: www.ginlc.org on the Education page.

Welcome New Members!
Through this period we put a fair amount of effort into creating and gathering all the components needed for a recent membership drive: the "all-resident" mailing that went out in May. As many residents were not familiar with our organization, this was our full-fledged effort to spread the word on Grosse Ile and to increase our membership. A hearty Welcome! goes out to the many islanders who accepted our invitation to join the Conservancy.

New Place to Tune In
Last month a colleague showed me photos that she had posted to her "blog." Within just a few minutes ginlc.blogspot.com was created. Without using any of the programming skills I learned in college, I was uploading photos and descriptions of some of the Conservancy's recent activities. It took a little time to learn some of the special features, like tying in to our website and setting up the subscription service for email updates, but I'm quite proud of this communications resource. Thank you to everyone who signed up for the subscription! It makes me feel like my efforts are appreciated! In return I promise not to overload you with "news" items. I will likely post several times a month, probably more often in summer than in winter.