By Barb Grover, Allegheny Group
The Allegheny Group of the Sierra Club has the responsibility each year of providing grant awards from the Huplits Wildlife Endowment. The Huplits Wildlife Grants Committee includes four members from the Allegheny Group (Renee Dolney, Chris Shepherd, Chris Seymour, and Ellen Wright) and three people from outside the Group (Matt MacConnell, Gary Kendal and Mike Molesevich.) Grant proposals must be designed to help protect animal wildlife and wildlife habitat in Pennsylvania. Requests for proposals were advertised in February 2023 with a May 1, 2023, deadline. This year we had a maximum of $100,000 that we could grant. After review by the committee members,the following organizations were given awards, totaling $40,110.
We are going to have another Request for Proposals this year starting in September because we needed to offer more awards than the $40,000. We encourage all our Sierra Club members and other environmental organizations to consider submitting applications in the second round of 2023. The Request for Proposals will be available on the Allegheny Group’s website and the PA Chapter’s website in early September. Contact Chris Shepherd (shepherd999@gmail.com; 412-513-7242) for questions. The three proposals this year were:
Allegheny Land Trust $30,000
Description of Project: Helping to acquire 24 acres of woodland in Ross Township for their permanent conservation. This acquisition will create a contiguous 67 acre greenspace in an important watershed in a highly developed community.
Friends of the Urban Forest $6,254
Description of Project: To install 44 habitat boxes and educational signage across 5 acres of the Lawrenceville campus. These habitats will help improve several native PA wildlife populations Including a little brown bat and bluebird populations in the Allegheny River region.
Philadelphia Metro Wildlife Center $3,856
Description of project: The award will be used for nutritional support and eye diagnostics for an expected 3500 patients in 2023. The nutritional supplies will meet the health requirements of neonatal mammals, orphaned songbirds and raptors. The funds will also be used to procure an ophthalmoscope for vision diagnostics.
If this second round for the Huplits 2023 is too short a timeline, talk to Chris Shepherd at shepherd999@gmail.com; 412-513-7242. We’d like to give away more money.
This blog was included as part of the August 2023 Sylvanian newsletter. Please click here to check out more articles from this edition!