Establish Friends Groups

How We Establish and Support Canyon/Creek Friends Groups

To build a new canyon Friends group, we start with an educational tour. We distribute door to door, 1,000-3,000 invitations to a free educational tour in their neighborhood canyon. At these events we collect names and contacts for those interested in the Friends Group. Tour guides include Canyon Staff as well as knowledgeable volunteers and experts in native plants and San Diego wildlife.

We later invite tour participants and other local residents and stakeholders surrounding the canyon to attend an organizational meeting of the new Friends Group. At these meetings we train and enroll leaders and the attendees take on a variety of on-going responsibilities.

We help the friends groups plan and implement clean-ups and restoration events, often providing tools, donating native plants, and recruiting additional volunteers. Professional consultants volunteer to help establish on-going habitat restoration plans. We help groups coordinate with authorities such as Park Rangers, on creating Canyon Enhancement Plans. Eventually these groups function on their own to perform these and other duties to care for their local canyons.

We have built a County-Wide Canyons Coalition and facilitate quarterly meetings where the individual groups get together, share concerns, resources and information, and support each others efforts. We offer list-serve and web-based support as well as continued effort to build the volunteer and member support of each Friends Group.