What I Learned from my Mentorship

For my mentorship I worked with Ms. Autumn Phillips, Land Manager at American Chestnut Land Trust in Prince Frederick, Maryland. While there I worked Closely with Autumn and other volunteers that come on Thursday mornings to help clean, preserve and protect the property. I remember the first day I went and helped collect milkweed pods from a few remaining plants in the hope to bring back the species in the field. Later a man came back with a tractor and bush hogged the area where the plants were. Autumn is hoping that with regular mowing of the field and by replanting native species that the non native species will die off. I learned a lot about conservation, how it works and how to go about putting conservation in place. On another one of my mentor visits, I attended a large weekend workday where my brother and I along with about 30 other volunteers worked on different projects around the property. I was assigned with 4 other volunteers to build animal habitats out of dead fall in the woods. This will provide homes for animals as they nest, reproduce and grow their young.

The only problem I had working with the American Chestnut Land Trust was finding the time to go down and help. Regular, weekly, workdays are offered every Wednesday and Thursday, of course weather dependent; along with occasional weekend work days. I found other conservation work helping my brother at his placement. He was working at Spa Creek Conservancy in Annapolis. Zack, my father and I attended one of the Saturday workdays where a group of community volunteers got together to clean up a local park. We spent the day cleaning up trash, planting trees and planting a rain garden to catch run off. This was a very rewarding opportunity because at the end of the day we all got to sit back and see the work we had done and talk with community members about the joy this brings them. Being such and urban are, many of these people had never learned about planting trees or anything conservation related so I also enjoyed being able to educate the community about some little things they can do to make their neighborhood cleaner and a nicer place for the children to play.

Overall my time at the American Chestnut Land Trust was very enjoyable, Ms. Phillips was a pleasure to work with and has a wealth of information for anyone looking into the environmental conservation field. My day working with the volunteers at Spa Creek was very rewarding, and in my opinion is something that everyone should od at least once in their life, go out and help their community. Thank you for allowing me to participate in this mentorship program. As I mentioned, time was a challenging factor but I truly enjoyed and learned from my experience.