Jordan McKnight didn’t intend to start out the one hundredth Audubon campus chapter. As a sophomore at Howard College in Washington, D.C., she was simply making an attempt to satisfy different environmentally minded college students. Rising up in Bowie, Maryland, she linked to nature via the vegetation and animals round her residence. Two years after enrolling at Howard as a pre-vet biology main, she realized she had turn out to be disconnected from nature. So final semester, she modified her main to environmental science. She met a classmate who had lately interned at Bent of the River Audubon Middle and who launched McKnight to Gustavo Figueroa, Audubon on Campus applications supervisor. Figueroa urged the thought of beginning an Audubon campus chapter as a method to hook up with different college students who shared her targets.
Wanting round, McKnight noticed that Howard College already had three environmental pupil organizations: Fostering Animal Understanding, Nurturing and Advocacy (FAUNA), Howard University Water and Environmental Association (HUWEA), and HU Halo G.R.E.E.N.. Quite than begin a brand new one, the organizations’ leaders convened to type The Howard College Inexperienced Coalition and have become an official Audubon on Campus chapter.
Birds symbolize a brand new frontier to the coalition’s organizers, none of whom contemplate themselves birders. Sydney Sauls, a senior environmental science main and former treasurer of HUWEA, has a ardour for environmental justice and meals safety. “Howard is tremendous, tremendous urbanized. The bushes on campus are sacred,” she explains. Planting a bird-friendly backyard might assist deal with city warmth, she says. Aminah Coleman, a junior biology main and the secretary of HUWEA, has an curiosity in vegetation that led to an curiosity in bugs. She sees birds as an essential extension of these relationships. “It’s been tremendous cool to find out about them and I wish to carry that sense of connectedness to different individuals on campus,” she says. Buying a set of binoculars is excessive on the organizers’ listing of concepts to allow them to begin to study and educate others in regards to the birds round them.
The Progress of Audubon on Campus
This observe of mixing birds with different environmental pursuits is widespread amongst Audubon campus chapters. Many college students don’t be part of this system as avid birders or aspiring ornithologists. What they share as an alternative is a want to be energetic of their neighborhood, says Figueroa. Audubon on Campus helps college students discover the intersections between their pursuits and chicken conservation.
This can be a shift for the Audubon on Campus program, which launched in 2018 to attach faculty college students throughout the nation with Audubon’s work and supply them with sources for supporting it. Initially, chapters centered on birding, however after Audubon started offering funding for conservation tasks, they started to tackle extra action-oriented work like bird-friendly landscaping, window collision monitoring, and advocacy. Chapters have used Audubon funding to take part in networking occasions just like the Audubon Management Convention, which McKnight, Coleman, and Sauls attended in 2025.
Over the past eight years, Audubon on Campus has employed three workers, recruited 100 chapters in 36 states, and offered them with funding. Chapters have started a climate ambassador program, created art to raise awareness for conservation, designed a tool to measure light pollution, and surveyed threatened cuckoos. What’s made this system profitable, says Figueroa, is that it doesn’t matter what a chapter is captivated with, Audubon helps join it to birds.
Reclaiming Connections
Though all campus chapters work on chicken conservation, they every have distinctive motivations for doing so. For Howard College, there’s an essential cultural side to that alternative. McKnight, Sauls, and Coleman wish to discover and restore the connection between Black tradition and nature. “There’s been an enormous disconnect and I really feel like individuals don’t notice simply how linked we really was,” says McKnight. “We now have an extended historical past of connection that we don’t even learn about…and I really feel like, as soon as we educate our communities about that, they’ll perceive how essential it’s to contribute to conservation.” Coleman mentions that Africans used to depend on a deep understanding of nature, each in Africa and whereas escaping slavery. “I feel that relationship positively exists with birds, and it is one thing I might like to discover extra and be capable to educate extra individuals about,” she says.
Whereas city warmth, air pollution, and meals insecurity are the extra urgent points to the coalition organizers, they suppose studying about birds is efficacious. “I feel we’re at a time the place there’s going to be extra curiosity inside our communities in birding, the place I feel we might have some actually loopy breakthroughs,” says Sauls.
These breakthroughs are what Audubon on Campus is all about. With every campus chapter, the chicken conservation neighborhood grows extra versatile, extra energized, and more practical. Figueroa sees success within the type of lasting connections to conservation. “I feel that the worth total is that we’re seeing these pupil leaders absolutely see themselves as a part of the Audubon community,” he says. Meaning they continue to be energetic in chicken conservation and Audubon after faculty, whether or not as neighborhood chapter members, advocates, donors, or extra. No matter which profession path college students take, Figueroa hopes that they proceed to interact with conservation.
