Aullwood receives $45K grant

ENGLEWOOD, Ohio (WDTN) - Aullwood Audubon Center and Farm has been named the recipient of a $45,000 TogetherGreen Innovation Grant, provided through an alliance between National Audubon Society and Toyota.

The program provided financial support for projects that use innovative approaches and technologies to engage new and diverse audiences in conservation and tackle pressing conservation problems.

Urban development, polluted runoff, and litter have all combined to greatly degrade the quality of Wolf Creek and the wildlife habitats along its banks. This also means that Dayton’s residents are deprived of healthy, beautiful aquatic corridors to call their own.

With a 2011 Innovation Grant, Aullwood Audubon Center and Farm hopes to change all that. They’re launching a conservation initiative that connects students in grades 2-12 with undergraduates and professors from Central State University, a historically Black University, to transform degraded urban land into an interconnected greenway along Wolf Creek. This initiative will focus on a half-mile corridor of degraded riparian habitat, expand Dayton Public Edison prek-8 School’s Land Lab, and enrich a newly created urban prairie. Over 450 students will participate in a series of hands-on activities that include trash and invasive plant removal, collection of soil and water samples, planting native wildflowers and wildlife surveys. These activities expand Aullwood’s work in this Dayton neighborhood, as the Wolf Creek borders a 37-acre emerging tallgrass prairie that will be planted in the spring 2012 on a former brownfield through a 2010 Innovation Grant.

"Never underestimate ingenuity and innovation. The approaches that will help us tackle the enormous environmental challenges confronting us today are going to come from unlikely and unpredictable places,” said Audubon President David Yarnold. “Each Innovation Grant project is an opportunity for Audubon to partner with local organizations to test and implement creative approaches to build healthier communities and achieve significant conservation results. And as our alliance with Toyota shows, when organizations work together, we can exponentially magnify our impact.”

Since 2008, the TogetherGreen Innovation Grants program has awarded over $4.7 million to more than 160 environmental projects nationwide.