- Well good afternoon, my name is Becky Sapper and I work for the University of Wisconsin-Extension out of the Environmental Resources Center, I've worked with Extension since about 2007 and prior to that I worked for the Nature Conservancy for around 10 years.  I've been in the role of director for the Wisconsin Master Naturalist Program for about six months, almost exactly.  And so I'm still learning a little bit more about the program, although I have been an instructor for the program since 2012.  And have done several courses as a Master Naturalist instructor.  So I'm excited to talk to you today,  about the program, about our instructors, and about our volunteers, and about ways you can become involved in the program as well.  And apparently I was clicker happy before, which led it to, your biggest questions might be: "What is a naturalist?" and "How to I become a Master?" Well, the first question to that is easier to answer than the second.  The first question, as far as a naturalist, is really anyone who's really curious about nature.  Those who want to learn more about natural sciences is students of natural resources, the person who asks, "Why does that plant grow down there "in that wet area but not up on the hill?" "And why is that species of mushroom "only on this species of tree?" or, "What is that bird that I keep hearing?" "Wait a second, it's a red squirrel, not a bird." Those folks that keep asking questions and keep learning more.  And that's actually really how you become a Master.  It's by asking more questions and continuing the lifelong learning process. 

 You're not going to become a Master after taking a 40-hour training course, but a Master Naturalist Program and the volunteer training course that's with it, helps to spark a little fire that leads you to asking more questions then becoming that Master by asking more questions and learning more.   So the mission of the Wisconsin Master Naturalist Program is really to promote awareness, understanding and stewardship of our state's natural resources with a network of well informed citizens that dedicate service to Wisconsin's communities.   So that's the official words, but really, what does that mean?  It means that we partner with instructors that are trained to use our Wisconsin Master Naturalist curriculum and they teach the citizens of Wisconsin about natural resources and the issues that affect them based on our Master Naturalist curriculum.   Those volunteers then give back to Wisconsin with volunteer service.  They also seek additional trainings so that they can further their learning.  And Master Naturalists Program really builds a network of volunteers, instructors and organizations that support conservation across the state.  We also track their efforts.  So we can recognize those volunteers and instructors.  And at the end of their year, if they meet the requirements, then they get a little pin with a wildlife on it.  Here's the last couple year's with a metal arc and a slider and the otter, To sort of give them a bit of recognition. 

 They also get a name badge to wear while they're doing their service as well.   So Wisconsin Master Naturalist Volunteers attend a 40-hour training course.  The training course costs 250 dollars.  There are scholarships that are available though.  So we don't ever want to see the cost of the program actually becoming a hardship for people to participate.  50 dollars of that cost goes back to the instructors and their organizations.  The volunteers then annually perform and record a minimum of 40 hours of service, and receive eight hours of additional trainings.  The service areas that we like to see volunteers provide service for are in education, citizen science and stewardship.  And the big question in the community that comes up is, "Oh, I wasn't able to meet my requirements" "for the year and I've lost my certification.  "What do I need to do to get the certification back?" And people do not lose certifications. 

 They may become inactive for a year because there's those years when you have those four out of state weddings, or a job change, and you just don't have the ability to volunteer.  You don't lose your certification.  Just the next year, you volunteer again.  You become active again. You record your hours.  And so you still maintain your status as a Master Naturalist volunteer.   This isn't a new concept at all.  There's-- many of the states have Master Naturalist programs.  They might not always be called Master Naturalist programs.  Sometimes they're just called a naturalist program, or a volunteer naturalist program, or just even a volunteer service.  Texas has had theirs for nearly 20 years, and Minnesota, their programs' been around for at least 10 years. 

 And they've been very, very supportive of Wisconsin's emergence as their program has provided us a lot of support.   Last year I just had spoken to the director at the Minnesota program and she told me in 2015 that their volunteers performed over 60,000 hours of volunteer service.  That's a value of over 1.3 million dollars.  When you use a Bureau of Labor statistics amount.   There's also a umbrella organization.  And this is called the Alliance of Natural Resource Outreach and Service Programs.  And this program helps to coordinate a yearly conference for all the Master Naturalist programs across the country, and provides monthly webinars.  Just a way to keep the programs networked and able to learn from each other.   So Wisconsin, the idea's been around for a while, but we're just now starting to kind of get our feet underneath us.  There's lots of discussions from 2005 to 2009 about the program, about programs in other states and the desire to have a program, a Master Naturalist program in the state of Wisconsin. 

 And in 2009 those discussions became more serious.  And an advisory committee was formed, curriculum was developed, two pilot courses occurred, one in Ashland and one in Madison.  There was a pilot instructor's training that happened and the website was launched.  And so in 2013 was when this program was fully launched.  And so we're still relatively a new program.   So who exactly, is the Wisconsin Master Naturalist Program, though? I like to think of this as the proverbial three-legged stool.  Because it couldn't exist without each of these legs.  Those legs are the staff for the program, the instructors that perform the volunteer training courses, and then the volunteers themselves.  But this stool needs something also to stand on, and we're lucky that Wisconsin to have the support of the University of Wisconsin, where the program is run through, the Environmental Resources Center, which is actually co-directed by University of Wisconsin-Extension and University of Wisconsin-Madison out of the College of Ag and Life Sciences.  We also have the support of host organizations, that allow their employees to become instructors, and to run the program through their organizations. 

 And we're lucky enough to have the support of Natural Resources Foundation of Wisconsin as well, who helps us to promote our program, promote the activities that we have, and provide a fund for us so that we can receive private donations that help support the program as well, so thank you, Natural Resources Foundation of Wisconsin.   So our staff, including myself, we also have Astrid Newenhouse, and Martha Martin, who are both out of the Environmental Resources Center as well.  But between the three of us, we all have other job duties as well, so if you total us together, our time for Master Naturalist Program really totals about one fulltime staff person.   We do have 63 instructors across the state, we just finished a instructor training in early February, and trained 19 new instructors.  And so we're happy to have these 63 instructors across the state.  But you can see there are some gaps, so we're still looking for more instructors and would like to have more instructors trained to give the volunteer training course.  But just to give you an idea of who these instructors represent, and I know you probably won't be able to read this from the back of the room, but just wanted to show you the breadth.  These include colleges and universities, nature centers, friends organizations, tribal entities, Department of Natural Resources, just to name a few.  What we don't have up there and what folks have been talking about today, it would be great to have associations as part of this.  And I think there's a lot of potential for us to involve the Lakes communities as host organizations too. 

  So please, be an instructor.  By being an instructor you can help recruit volunteers for your organization, you can provide consistent training, for existing volunteers as well as the new volunteers coming into your organization, you can receive program revenue, at 50 dollars per person, so if you have 20 people take a course, then your organization would receive a thousand dollars for doing that.  It's a way to participate in a statewide network, and you can also create a local community of volunteers in your area.  And let us, as Wisconsin Master Naturalist Program, track your volunteer hours for you.  And you can use those volunteer hours to help match grants, too.  So we're able to track those hours.   So I thought I'd give you a little bit more of the nitty gritty of the volunteer training course.  A little bit of the nuances that happen in the volunteer training course.   The course covers eight core topics.  There's required field experiences that are part of the course. 

 There's resources including guest speakers, hands-on activities, books and tools that are part of the volunteer training course.  There's a required Capstone project that each participant is required to complete, and of course we have evaluations so that we can continue to improve our program.  The curriculum, eight core topics include landscapes, which is our geology, ecology, plant communities, wildlife, interpretation education, water, water life, and then human influences.   And you might note on this page that the curriculum actually has a draft on it-- it's a March 13 draft version.  It's one of the main things I'm looking to doing in my first year here with the program, is getting this curriculum from a draft stage to a final stage.  And as I've been looking at that, looking at the details we need to do to complete that, I've also been thinking that there's a couple chapters that might be missing in there that we need to add in.  And that includes the service areas, we're looking for people to volunteer, we have interpretation education in there, but we don't have a lot of information in there yet about citizen science and stewardship.  We'd like to include that into the curriculum as well and have a chapter on service areas and talk about education, citizen science, and stewardship.   In addition, at the end of each chapter, there are sections on explore, teach, conserve, and expand.  And these give examples of places to visit in Wisconsin, in the Explore area, they give examples of instructional activities that volunteers can use. 

  They give-- In the conserve section, is information about groups and organizations that could use volunteers, so that Master Naturalists know where to look to do the volunteer opportunities.  And then also there's an expanded section, with more resources so the people can continue their growth and learning.   Guest experts are encouraged to help with the volunteer training course.  Because we can't expect instructors to be the master of all these different chapters that we're talking about.  So our guest experts are really important and they provide more of a local context for the materials within the chapter.  Our curriculum covers the entire state, so it's pretty broad.  Minnesota's curriculum has different chapters, or different curriculum, for different biomes or different regions of their state.  They encouraged us not to go that route, but instead to have one curriculum that covers the entire state.  So by doing that, the curriculum's pretty broad.  And we worked with our instructors to bring that broad level information down to where it's locally relevant, depending on where the course is being held in this state. 

  Field experiences are also a really important part of the course.  It's required that at least 16 hours of the 40-hour course is spent outdoors.  And that's a minimum.  A lot of our courses actually flip that and spend less than 16 hours in the classroom and more hours out in the field.  And this provides a way for the different learning styles to actually grasp information, to actually be able to do it hands-on, to learn it by seeing, by feeling.  And so it's not just sitting in a classroom and listening to an instructor talk.   The Capstone Projects are pretty interesting.  This is an opportunity for those that are taking the course to build their skills and confidence in the areas in which they eventually want to volunteer.  So they do-- We encourage them to do this in a group of two to three people, and they pick a project and instructors help them to determine what the project is, and who they're working with, as an organization for volunteer opportunities whether that be a citizen science project or an education project or a stewardship project.   They do this Capstone Project over the time period of the course, and then the last day of the course, the class gets together and they talk about their Capstone Projects and they present what they did to their classmates, and there's a time for feedback, for critiques of what they could do differently, for opportunities to celebrate the things that went well. 

 This really does help to build their confidence for the next step of going out and volunteering within organizations on their own.   We like to do this with the groups because it helps to demonstrate the relationships that occur when you volunteer because you rarely volunteer in a bubble by yourself, you're usually volunteering for an organization so there's relationships that need to be made with the organizations and asking folks to do their Capstone Projects as a group helps to illustrate the benefits and sometimes the challenges that happen as far as working with the groups.  The great thing, though, is that three hours of time spent on Capstone Projects outside of the course can be put towards the 40 hour volunteer service hours for their first year.   One of the neat things about the Wisconsin Master Naturalist Program is the flexibility in the scheduling.  Not every course is run the same way.  It really depends on the needs of the instructor and the host organizations and the type of participants that they're looking for.  So some course are held in the evening, once a week, over a 12-week period.  Some are held during the daytime, for a half day, two days a week, over a six-week period.  There are courses that are held for six straight days, nine to five, some are held on the weekends, Saturdays and Sundays, some are held in evenings, some are held in the day, so it really varies upon where the course is being held and what's working best for that organization, and the types of folks they're actually looking to actually participate.  If they hold a course during the day they're not gonna get professionals and the work force to be there, but they're gonna attract a lot of the retirees. 

 And if that's who they're looking for, then that's where they're probably going to hold a course.  If they're looking to help attract some of the work force, then they're probably going to hold the course in the evenings or on the weekends.   Program evaluation is really important for us.  We're lucky within the Environmental Resources Center to have a really good evaluations department and they've done a really good job helping us create some pre-course and post course surveys.  We administer this online, so it can be taken through a phone or iPad, or on a computer.  And we handle it all through the Master Naturalists Program so that the instructors don't need to worry abut that part of it at all.  The instructors do, do check ins and more informally, during the course, just to be sure they're on target for the needs of the class as well.   So why do we do the program evaluation? We always wanna continue to improve the program.  This is still new so we're still learning.  We wanna hear back from people about what's going well and what are some things that we can tweak. 

 We wanna be able to prioritize those areas that we're working on and we're responsible to our funders too and we have reporting that needs to be done.  This helps us to tell our story, to get the evaluations back from the participants.  It also helps the instructors.  Because they get to know their audience before the class starts.  The pre-course survey helps to tell them who's actually coming in, what level of knowledge do they coming in with, what's their education, what's their experience, what are the demographics for age.  It helps them learn more about where these participants want to volunteer when they're done.  What-- If they want to do education or if they wanna do-- if there's more folks that wanna do citizen science and they can help craft how their course is structured.  It also helps to improve instruction based on comments that we've received from the post-course survey, because that's where individuals are allowed to give feedback of "Hey, this speaker was great." "Make sure you get him back here the next time." Or, "You might not want to have this guest speaker next time," or "Probably not the best field trip," or, "We probably shouldn't be standing "on the side of the road "when we're looking at this feature." It's great way to get feedback and improve the course for the next time.  And it's also a very good source of quotes that you can use for reporting.  Astrid does a lot of the evaluations for us and she refers to these quotes as text candy. 

 Because they're so sweet.  It's really neat to see some of the things people say about the courses.   This is just a screenshot of our webpage.  And there's lots of different faces to the webpage.  There's a public face that anyone can access and learn more about the program but once you become a volunteer, then you get a log-in and you can't see it but it's at the every top of the, very top of the webpage.  And volunteers can login here and this is where they log their volunteer hours and their additional training that they take.  There's more resources available to them when they log in.  They can see more volunteer opportunities that are posted on the page.  And the instructors also have another face of the webpage where they can see even more information and it gives them resources on how to actually teach the course, too.  So they're several different levels of layers into our website. 

  So volunteers. Volunteers are awesome.  You guys have been hearing this for the last couple days here.  It's amazing what volunteers do and the impact that we have from volunteers.  Before I talk more about the Master Naturalist volunteers, I wanted to show you a few stats that are from the Corporation of National Community Service.  I looked these up last night because I was part of a talk yesterday with Candace, who's our volunteer coordinator, here at UW Stevens Point, and she was sharing some good information and I wanted to look up a little bit more and see more about volunteers.  And nationwide we're going strong with volunteerism.  Almost 63 million Americans volunteer and that estimated value of that volunteers over 184 million, billion, I'm sorry, billion dollars.   Another fact is that volunteering benefits not just those that are being served but the volunteers themselves.  Candace was talking some more about the physical and mental benefits that volunteering brings but there's also another aspect.  And that's the fact that volunteers have higher odds of getting a job after, after being out of work than non-volunteers. 

 And I can think of two examples already, just off the top of my head of volunteers who have taken a volunteer training course begin volunteering for an organization and within a year of being hired there, because they're just doing such a good job.   Also, regardless of age, everyone can volunteer.  Nationally, Generation X, the 33 to 49 year olds have the highest rate of volunteerism but it's the older generation, the 75 plus that actually volunteer the most hours.  And we see that in the Master Naturalist Program quite a bit, our demographics are more toward the higher end, and these are folks that are very passionate about natural resources, who weren't able maybe to make it a career for themselves, and now that they're retired are really excited about being out in the natural world and volunteering.   Over the past 13 years, volunteers have made a huge impact.  So over, just under a 105 billion hours have been volunteered in the last 13 years in the United States.  That's the equivalent of over two trillion dollars.   And let's celebrate Wisconsin.  Wisconsin is number three in the country for volunteering.  About 34 percent of Wisconsin citizens volunteer. 

 And that's an amazing figure.   Top two states, anybody wanna guess?  Minnesota's fourth.   Yeah, Idaho and Utah.   So Wisconsin, 1.58 million people volunteer.  And they volunteer 147.5 million hours of service and that's over 3.4 billion dollars worth of estimated service.   So we know that there are people who wanna volunteer, there's people out there that are volunteering.  So the Master Naturalist Program can help link these people up that want to volunteer to the folks who have opportunities to volunteer.  There's lots of opportunities to volunteer.  We don't need to create opportunities for people to volunteer, because in Wisconsin, we have a big need for volunteers.  So how can you become a Master Naturalist volunteer? You can if you're over 18 years old, because we only have an adult program right now. 

 We don't have a youth program.  It's just for an adult audience.  You need to be curious about the natural world, and want to learn more about it.  Support conservation, and be willing to provide volunteer service.  That's all the requirements there are.  Master Naturalists, again, doesn't happen in a 40-hour course.  This is just a stepping stone to that lifelong learning.   We do ask, though, that people abide by a code of ethic.  If you can't see in the very back, this is a person reading a No Ethics magazine and at the top it says, "Using Your Pet Cockroach to Eat Free in Restaurants." So because people volunteer for the host organizations, we ask that people do abide by a code of ethic and basically, in a nutshell, that code of ethic says you agree to be a decent human being.  That you're gonna represent the Master Naturalists Program, the University, and the host organizations well. 

  So currently we have trained over 400 Master Naturalists volunteers across the state.  These pins represent a zipcode, not an individual, so some of those pins represent, you know, up to 10 people and others represent individual folks.  But you an also tell where the holes are in the state and those kind of parallel pretty well to where the holes were for our instructors.  So as we gather more instructors across the state, then they'll be able to track the volunteers in those areas as well.   Another thing is that even though we've trained 400 Master Naturalists Volunteers, not everyone takes the course because they want to volunteer.  Sometimes they take the course just because they want to learn a little bit more about Wisconsin, they want to learn a little bit more about what those chapters are.  And that's okay. We encourage that as well.  Because it's a first step to social engagement and behavior change to start that learning process.  So even though we've trained over 400 Master Naturalist Volunteers, in 2015 we had about 150 that were really active.  And those are the ones that are recording hours. 

 And I still think that's a pretty good number.  2012 was our pilot year and some of those pilot courses did not occur until October, November, so we didn't expect to see too many hours in 2012.  But in 2013 and up, you can see the trajectory that we have here on this line and we're really excited by that and we hoping it continues on that path.  So for our Master Naturalist service hours, you can see that consistently, as the years have gone on, the bottom orange, I think the color is showing up here, is education, the blue is citizen science, and the green is stewardship hours.  And a good half is education, the other half is split pretty equally between citizen science activities and the stewardship activities.   And in 2015 there was just a little over 9,000 hours from those 150 volunteers that were given to Wisconsin.  Considering the program is three years old, that's a pretty good number for us.  Yeah?  Sure, the question was can I explain the difference between citizen science and stewardship? Citizen science, we're classifying more as a monitoring and collecting data, where stewardship we're talking more about on the ground, hands-on land management activities.   So total volunteer hours for the program between 2012 and 2015 has been over 17,000 volunteer service hours.   And, so a little over 9,000 in education, over 3700 hours in stewardship, and over 4200 hours in citizen science. 

 And for Wisconsin then, that brings, when we're using that Bureau of Labor statistics, the value for volunteer service, that for Wisconsin has already brought in over 385 thousand dollars worth of service to the state.   I just wanted to also talk about the additional training hours that volunteers do.  You know they're required to do the 8 hours per year, but when we do the math, they're averaging more about 14 hours per year.  People just want to learn and wanna continue their growth, so meeting that eight hours of minimum, additional training isn't a problem for volunteers.   So I put a blank slide here because I have to apologize for the next three slides.  Because I threw the best practice for using PowerPoints out the window for the next three slides because I just want to brag about the type of work our volunteers are doing and they're so many words in here because I had to pick from 150 people doing volunteer service, I wanted to give some examples of what they were doing.  It's very hard to limit those examples.  So here are examples in the citizen science realm, the over 2300 hours of volunteer service, the type of volunteer activities that happened in citizen science.  They helped to monitor bats, loons, salamanders, pollinators, deer, wolves, damsel and dragonflies, plants, small mammals, birds, owls, frogs and toads, earthworms, waterfowl bag surveys, water quality in the many different ways, invasive plant surveys and bluebirds.   And you can tell by the different organizations and different programs that they volunteer for here, like I said, we don't have to create opportunities for people to volunteer. 

 There's a lot of existing needs out there already and people are finding them.  So that's just citizen science.  In education interpretation, just to highlight quickly, I'm not gonna read through all the words on here but, some activities that happened in the 4800 hours that were done in 2015 included leading a tour of a collection crawl at the Museum of Natural History at UW Stevens Point, updating social media, demonstrating urban preserves to city management in the Shioc River, greeting visitors, helping out at a nest box seminar in Horicon Marsh, leading a wild cranberry treasure hunt that included tasting the difference between wild cranberries and commercial cranberries, an after school program with a science club, creating an interpretive trail map, both in English and in Spanish for a school.  And also producing a radio segment called Kids Naturally.  So just some of the educational activities that happened.   And for stewardship activities, so this is more on the ground work, so removing invasive plants, looking at habitat for showy lady slippers, restoring prairies, mowing trails, doing a cleanup for Earth Days, creating pollinator habitat, building woodpecker houses, burning sections of prairies, lots of neat on the ground activities.  The thing that you're gonna see in common here and that is required is that the volunteer service is actually done within an organization or an entity.  Somebody just wants to go pick up litter on the beach, that doesn't count as volunteer service.  But if they wanna go pick up litter on the beach with the volunteer cleanup day with a certain organization, then those hours count.  And that helps just prevent hours of folks weeding their native garden in their own backyard and calling that volunteer service. 

 Although you can do bird feeder watches as long as it's part of the bird feeder watch programs.   So join us. Become a volunteer.  Become an instructor.  And host volunteer trainings.  Help us to provide additional training opportunities to our Master Naturalist Volunteers.  In 2016, we already have nine courses listed on our website across the state and we're hoping that we'll probably double that amount in the next month or so as instructors start to post their courses.  We're also looking to have a instructor training in the La Crosse area sometime this fall, so if you're interested in that, please let me know.   And so I've been asked, in the first six months in this position, what do I think about the Wisconsin Master Naturalist Program and I have to say I've totally bought in to the idea of this lifelong learning.  I really enjoy the aspect that we're continually to ask questions, that we're continually trying to learn and better ourselves for the communities here of Wisconsin.  I also like the networking, whether it's providing connections between the organizations, whether it's providing connections as an instructor as I'm working with guest resource speakers in my area, whether it's making the connections with the volunteers. 

 Any time there's a conversation there's connections made, it's gonna lead to good things.  So I really like that networking side of things.  That and it's really inspiring.  Working with volunteers just motivates someone.  And the other part of my job I work with natural resource agencies and organizations and those folks are very passionate too.  They have to be passionate to work in this natural resources world.  We certainly don't get paid to do it, right.  But they live with it every day.  And when you turn in your work with volunteers, they get so excited about the activities that they're doing and it does leave an impression.  And just as an example, yesterday, when I came and I picked up my name tag at the registration desk the person who handed me my name tag said, "Oh, you're with Master Naturalist Program." And she said, "I took the Master Naturalist Program "in Minnesota." She said it was a life changing event. 

 And I kind of smiled, "A life changing event?" And she said "No, really." "It's the reason why I'm doing what I'm doing now." "Because I took that course." And stories like that, it means so much.  Because the experiences people have during this process of the training course, I think, are really meaningful.  And in the famous words of Dr. Seuss, "There's fun to be done." Because this is really fun.  I'm having a great time in my job with the Master Naturalist Program.  It's a lot of fun.  And so, that is the end of my talk.  Do we have time for questions? (applause) Thanks.    - Well good afternoon, my name is Becky Sapper