Introducing the 100th Audubon Campus Chapter: Howard University Green Coalition

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 attempting to fulfill different environmentally minded college students. Rising up in Bowie, Maryland, she linked to nature via the crops and animals round her house. 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 just lately interned at Bent of the River Audubon Middle and who launched McKnight to Gustavo Figueroa, Audubon on Campus packages supervisor. Figueroa prompt the thought of beginning an Audubon campus chapter as a manner 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.. Somewhat 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 think about 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 timber on campus are sacred,” she explains. Planting a bird-friendly backyard might assist tackle city warmth, she says. Aminah Coleman, a junior biology main and the secretary of HUWEA, has an curiosity in crops that led to an curiosity in bugs. She sees birds as an necessary extension of these relationships. “It’s been tremendous cool to study them and I need to convey 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 be taught and train others in regards to the birds round them.

The Progress of Audubon on Campus

This follow 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 need to be energetic of their group, says Figueroa. Audubon on Campus helps college students discover the intersections between their pursuits and fowl 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 assets for supporting it. Initially, chapters targeted on birding, however after Audubon started offering funding for conservation initiatives, 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 obsessed with, Audubon helps join it to birds.

Reclaiming Connections

Though all campus chapters work on fowl conservation, they every have distinctive motivations for doing so. For Howard College, there’s an necessary cultural facet to that selection. McKnight, Sauls, and Coleman need 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 understand simply how linked we really was once,” says McKnight. “Now we have a protracted historical past of connection that we don’t even find out about…and I really feel like, as soon as we educate our communities about that, they’ll perceive how necessary 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 believe that relationship positively exists with birds, and it is one thing I might like to discover extra and have the ability to train extra individuals about,” she says.

Whereas city warmth, air pollution, and meals insecurity are the extra urgent points to the coalition organizers, they assume studying about birds is effective. “I believe we’re at a time the place there’s going to be extra curiosity inside our communities in birding, the place I believe we might have some actually loopy breakthroughs,” says Sauls. 

These breakthroughs are what Audubon on Campus is all about. With every campus chapter, the fowl conservation group grows extra versatile, extra energized, and simpler. Figueroa sees success within the type of lasting connections to conservation. “I believe that the worth total is that we’re seeing these pupil leaders absolutely see themselves as a part of the Audubon community,” he says. Which means they continue to be energetic in fowl conservation and Audubon after faculty, whether or not as group chapter members, advocates, donors, or extra. No matter which profession path college students take, Figueroa hopes that they proceed to interact with conservation.