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Badger Volunteers & Friends of Lake Wingra

Badger Volunteers Group Shot

This fall, Friends of Lake Wingra has made some great new friends, the Badger Volunteers!  Badger Volunteers is a program organized by the Morgridge Center for Public Service at UW.  This program pairs university students with local community organizations (schools, non-profits or municipalities) to volunteer over the course of the semester on a weekly basis.  There are currently 141 teams of Badger Volunteers, consisting of 780 students working with 74 community partners.  This is a large program that really makes an effort to connect the University to the rest of the community.

This is the first semester that FoLW has had a team and we have had them hard at work all over the watershed!  Our team (pictured left – right above) consists of Brittany Cobb, the team leader, who is majoring in Environmental Studies and Biology and pursuing a Global Health Certificate, Jacques Boudreau who is majoring in History and pursuing a Business certificate and Sam Kisting who is majoring in Mechanical Engineering.  All three of our team members grew up in Wisconsin, Brittany is from Milwaukee and Jacques and Sam grew up together in Janesville.

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Over the course of the semester our team has worked on removing invasive plants from one of the prairie plantings along the SW bike path, helped out with raking as well as monitoring for the 2nd year of the leaf-free streets pilot project, cleaned out rain gardens, and did some research to help us with expanding our outreach.

We have been so fortunate to have this dedicated team of volunteers throughout this semester!  We are looking forward to hosting another team this spring semester.  Thanks so much to Brittany, Jacques and Sam for all your hard work!