Vanessa Dawley ’23 is one of 26 student fellows conducting research with a community-based organization in upstate New York this summer as a part of the Upstate Institute Summer Field School.
Hello, fellow friends of pollinators! My name is Vanessa Dawley, and I am the Summer Field School Fellow for the Pollinator Project. My pronouns are she/her; I am a rising senior at Colgate University and a staff member of the University’s Outdoor Education Program. Each year, Colgate offers a pre-orientation program, where staff members lead first-year students on an outdoor trip within the Adirondacks — anything from backpacking, to canoeing, or rock climbing. Within this program, trip leaders act in roles of stewardship for outdoor environments, teaching about a range of topics, including Indigenous history, local communities, and Leave No Trace principles. Stewardship is something that I consider one of my core values, and it was this familiarity seen in the mission statement of the Pollinator Project that drew me toward it.
From my first day of work in the Pollinator Project, a whole new world opened up before me, and my introduction to the AdkAction community was bright, compassionate, and inspiring. The Keeseville office is filled to the brim with ideas and creativity. On the very first day, I was able to get my hands dirty, installing native plants at the local Keeseville community garden. I had the opportunity to meet local individuals with whom we will be teaming up through the Pollinator Garden Assistance Program, and I was able to begin preparations for the upcoming plant sales. The pollinator plant sale is a critical part of the pollinator project because it empowers individuals with new knowledge about native plants and pollinators and teaches them how to advocate for pollinators by protecting their habitats. Through gardening, we move toward a more sustainable and diverse ecology to support all life.
As the Pollinator Project Fellow, I am one of the primary advocates for the needs of pollinators. Subsequently, the relationship between native plants, birds, bees, butterflies, wasps (please show the wasps some love), moths, and more is one of my priorities. I tend to the home base of operations on the Uihlein Farm Greenhouse to ensure that we are providing the safest, healthiest plants to folks who are creating beautiful waypoints for pollination to occur. In order to create a workspace that supports our mission statement as well as shows our thanks to the Uihlein Foundation, master gardener Lisa Salamon and I have installed a pollinator garden in front of the Uihlein Foundation greenhouse. This pollinator garden symbolizes the project’s aims of education, empowerment, and advocacy by reimagining a space to reflect the needs of pollinators. The Pollinator Garden Assistance Program partners with local communities within the Adirondacks such as schools, churches, and town boards to create gardens to advocate for native, non-human life. Native plants and pollinators have a symbiotic and mutually beneficial relationship. Plants provide pollen or nectar to the pollinators, which spread their seeds so that they can grow far outside the current garden and increase biodiversity. Biodiversity creates stabilization that provides a safe world for people and nature. As rates of native species continue to decrease in response to human activity, humans are increasingly responsible for conserving current biodiversity and working to restore damaged ecologies. When thriving, this pollinator garden does both by giving pollinators a waypoint along their journey and facilitating native plant growth.
One of my goals for the summer fellowship was to create educational templates for folks to use in their own spaces to spread awareness of pollinator needs as well as how to conserve them. The framework of community-based research emphasizes passing down knowledge through local networks so that more voices are able to contribute to educating one another by bringing a diversity of identities and lived experiences to the table. To conclude, not only does the Pollinator Project directly educate folks about the importance of protecting pollinators, but it also empowers them to continue to educate others, widening the circle of knowledge and reducing human hierarchies over nature.
