For the previous three years, I’ve helped lead Audubon’s Texas Ladies in Conservation program, working with colleagues and honorees to acknowledge ladies who’ve made vital contributions to conservation in Texas.
This yr marks this system’s eleventh yr of this system which bestows the Terry Hershey Award. We have now now accomplished a full decade of recognizing extraordinary conservation management, and we’re looking forward to what the subsequent decade can turn into.
When the award was established, George Bristol served as Chair of the Audubon Texas Advisory Board, whereas longtime Texas conservation chief Dr. Andrew Sansom was a former Advisory Board member and emeritus member for Audubon Texas and former Chairman of the Nationwide Audubon Society Board of Administrators. Collectively, they performed a key position in approaching Terry Hershey about lending her identify to an award recognizing ladies advancing conservation throughout the state.
It’s troublesome to think about a extra becoming inspiration. Terry Hershey was a outstanding conservation chief whose affect reached throughout Texas and past. She served on the Nationwide Audubon Society Board of Administrators and helped discovered the state’s largest native chapter group now often called Birds Houston. Over a long time of advocacy and management, she labored to guard rivers and bayous, floodplains, open areas, wildlife habitats, and the pure locations that make Texas particular. The Terry Hershey Award carries that legacy ahead by recognizing ladies whose management is altering conservation in Texas.
Every year, Audubon produces brief movies celebrating award honorees and their contributions. Throughout filming, I’ve watched a sample emerge repeatedly. These are terribly completed ladies, but their intuition is never to start by speaking about themselves. They discuss concerning the colleagues who labored alongside them, the locations they love, the organizations they helped construct, and the communities they serve. Typically it takes a bit of encouragement to get them to acknowledge the total influence of their very own contributions and management.
There’s something highly effective in that humility. It additionally reinforces why recognition issues. Texas Ladies in Conservation provides us a chance to cease and say: this work issues, their management modified Texas, and this can be a story price telling.
That turned particularly tangible final yr, when Audubon celebrated this system’s tenth anniversary. Greater than two-thirds of this system’s previous honorees returned for the Austin celebration, bringing collectively a rare group of girls whose collective influence stretches throughout a long time and almost each nook of conservation in Texas.
That night, Audubon additionally offered a particular tenth Anniversary Legacy Award honoring former First Girl, Girl Chicken Johnson, accepted on her behalf by her daughter, Luci Baines Johnson.
This yr, Pamela Reese, Lydia Saldaña, and Shelly Plante be part of the legacy of extraordinary ladies acknowledged by the Terry Hershey Award, turning into the 2026 honorees for his or her contributions to conservation in Texas. Their tales, like these of the ladies honored earlier than them, display that there isn’t any single path to conservation management. The ladies celebrated by means of the Texas Ladies in Conservation program have protected wildlife, land and water, constructed establishments, educated the subsequent technology, strengthened communities, formed public coverage, supported conservation by means of philanthropy, and impressed others to turn into concerned.
And there are numerous extra tales nonetheless to inform.
As Texas Ladies in Conservation enters its second decade, Audubon is searching for the ladies who will outline its subsequent chapter. We rely on communities throughout Texas to assist us discover them.
Who’s constructing one thing vital in your group? Who has spent years quietly defending a spot that issues? Who’s bringing new voices into conservation, creating revolutionary options, mentoring the subsequent technology, or offering the management that makes progress doable?
Nominations for the 2027 Texas Ladies in Conservation Award Collection at the moment are open. Please submit a nomination here.
If an incredible girl in your community got here to thoughts as you learn these questions, I hope you’ll inform us about her.
For greater than a decade, Texas Ladies in Conservation has helped be certain that outstanding ladies and their management obtain the popularity they deserve. As we start the subsequent decade, we’ve a chance not solely to have a good time that legacy, however to proceed constructing it one story at a time.
