Kellams: The Ozark Society is once again supporting youth conservation education. The Ozark Society Youth Grant project funds conservation and environmental initiatives, engaging K-12 students with hands-on activities. Nonprofits and schools throughout the Ozarks, Ouachitas and northwest Louisiana are eligible for the program, with grant awards ranging from $500 to $2,500. Applications are open through the end of November. Ozarks at Large’s Jack Travis invited Lowell Collins to the Bruce and Ann Applegate News Studio One to talk more about the grant project. Collins heads up community engagement for the Ozark Society. She says it’s her job to keep tabs and share what’s going on in each chapter of the organization, and the youth grants are a great opportunity to engage different partners in their shared mission.
Collins: Well, what we’re trying to do is coordinate with all the Ozark Society chapters throughout the region, Louisiana to Springfield to Little Rock, and looking at what kind of activities the chapters are doing and making sure the word’s getting out about what they’re doing.
Ozark Society does a lot of different things, lots of different places. The Bayou Chapter in Louisiana is super active, and they’re always doing community projects, teaching people to paddle, going out hiking with people. The Little Rock chapter last week did a project with the Nature Conservancy doing restoration out on a Nature Conservancy project. So we’re just doing all kinds of things related to conservation and education related to the natural environment.
Travis: Yeah. Let’s get the word out a little bit about what’s been going on up here. What have you all been doing in northwest Arkansas?
Collins: In northwest Arkansas, we just participated in the Lee Creek cleanup. It was our fifth annual year to have the most participants at that event, so we got an award for that. We’re looking forward to Buffalo River trail maintenance coming up in October. That’s one of our annual projects.
And then we have monthly meetings. Ozark Society meets monthly on the second Thursday of the month here in Fayetteville, that we have educational meetings. And then we also have a hiking season, and we’ll start hiking season shortly, and we’ll have weekly hikes that people can join. Everyone’s welcome to participate in any Ozark Society activity.
Travis: And you all have some grants that are open right now to apply for through the end of November. Can you tell me about the Ozark Society Youth Grants?
Collins: Yeah, the Ozark Society Youth Grants are an initiative we started five years ago, and it is our way to engage the next generation in environmental conservation. And so instead of creating programs ourselves, we’re supporting organizations, schools or nonprofits that are working with youth K to 18 years old, that are working with youth and have some kind of project that’s doing hands-on conservation. It can’t just be studying about it. It has to be going out and really actively participating in a conservation activity.
Travis: Can you give me some examples of past projects that you all have awarded?
Collins: Yeah, we’ve done a lot of different kinds of projects. Of course, we’ve done a few butterfly gardens and pollinator gardens, some of which have become monarch waystations. We’ve done a project with the library in West Fork that was doing a butterfly education. So their youth group in the library was doing a butterfly education thing, engaging other kids in butterfly, pollinator education. And so they were being the leaders.
We always like things that put the youth in a position where they’re leaders and they’re helping other people learn about something, water quality. We also have done projects that support turtles and bats and owls. Just a wide, wide range of projects. Just engaging youth in some kind of environmental conservation activity.
Travis: And you said you’re on the committee that considers these applications.
Collins: Yeah, I am. So we have our application. All the details of how you apply for the application can be found at ozarksociety.net, and it has all the details. Kind of tells what our preferences and priorities are. If someone’s looking at it, I highly recommend they look at those preferences and priorities, because that really helps them head the direction we are looking for, and we kind of prioritize.
We really like to see projects that are led by youth and initiated by youth, and then looking at making sure that we reach out to all the areas of the Ozark Society. So like, we have a chapter in Louisiana, we have Pulaski County chapter of Ozark Society, in Springfield, Missouri, the Schoolcraft Chapter, Buffalo River, northwest Arkansas. So we try and make sure we hit our whole region. And we have a very defined scoring system that we look through those projects and identify who we reward.
Travis: Yeah. OK. So that’s great that you all are all over this entire region, right? It’s because I think people might hear Ozark Society and think it’s just the Ozark Mountains, but that’s not the case.
Collins: No, the Ozark Society was founded to save the Buffalo River in 1962. And so we kind of started basically in northwest Arkansas. But since that time, we have established chapters, regional chapters. So the Ozark Society does a lot of outreach into our whole region.
Travis: You guys haven’t looked at applications yet, have you?
Collins: Oh, no.
Travis: OK.
Collins: Yeah. We won’t look at them until they all come in. And then we’ll divide them up and review them and have some very long Zoom meetings to decide who are the applicants that will award this year. We’ll probably award nine or so, depends on the year, somewhere between eight and 10.
And we expect to have, it’s hard to say, but most years we have in the mid-20s as the number of applications. So we have quite a few to work our way through. But it’s fun, it’s fun seeing the different things people come up with and the projects that kids come up with, teachers, nonprofits.
Travis: And what’s the award amount again?
Collins: From $500 to $2,500.
Travis: Do the applicants say how much money they’re looking for, or is that something...
Collins: Yeah, we request them to have a pretty specific budget of how they intend to spend the funds. And they need to have a pretty specific idea of what they want to engage the youth in. You know, if they’re going to do something with owls, what are the youth going to be doing with the owls? And maybe that project will pay for the owl houses that they’re building.
We’re doing a bat project this year that we’re paying for. It’s a school that’s doing outreach about bats with the youth. And then they’re doing bat houses, and then they’re going to track the bat houses, of where they’ve put them and if they get bats in them. So they have to be very specific. If they’re too vague, they don’t get scored very well.
Travis: All right. And you said that there is a pretty strict numeric-based system of scoring. But is there anything that you personally look for that maybe catches your eye whenever you see an application?
Collins: I think the ones that probably excite our committee and myself the most are the ones that are really youth-initiated. You know, you have a high school student, almost always a high school student, that has something that has caught their eye, and they’ve talked their environmental club or their science club or their 4-H group into the, “We should be doing this for our environment.” And so those are fun. Those definitely get moved to the top of the pile.
Travis: Do you have any from years past that might be good examples of programs?
Collins: A youth-led program, let me think. Well, Clinton High School this past year has had youth in their environmental club that wanted to do a nature trail along the river, along the Red River near their high school. And that was a youth-led project.
Two years ago, we had one that was a youth-led project from Fayetteville High School, which was their recycling of fiber project. That was kind of a different take on, you don’t think of that as hands-on conservation, but fibers, clothing, is highly... Wasted clothing is a problem in landfills, as anything is. We also had one, Rogers High School, some kids wanted to compost what was left over at lunch. And so they started a composting program. So we had a lot of different kinds of things.
Travis: Yeah, I like that because it’s something as simple as, you know, and I say simple, which I’m sure it’s actually not, but taking leftovers from lunch and composting them rather than putting them in the trash, all the way to building a trail.
Collins: Right.
Travis: Very varied.
Travis: Very different, very, very different. Yeah, we’ve had some great projects, and some of them are more simple. And the obvious thing, the pollinator garden, the butterfly garden, we fund a couple of those every year, but that’s a great way to get kids engaged in nature, to getting their hands dirty and planting things and then seeing butterflies and caterpillars.
Travis: Yeah. One more time, if you could just say where to go to find more information, or just anything else that you want to be sure that people know today.
Collins: Yeah, to get the details of, well, the application period is open right now, and it’s open until Nov. 30. All the details can be found at ozarksociety.net. There’s an email there for the grant. The grant email also can be found there if they have specific questions. And I’m the one who fields those, and we’ll be glad to answer people’s questions.
It’s a real great opportunity to share this very important project that we’re doing that carries forward the mission of Ozark Society, that education, recreation, conservation. And I think that you have to engage the next generation to achieve those goals. So we’re excited about it.
Kellams: Ozark Society’s Lowell Collins speaking with Ozarks at Large’s Jack Travis. You can visit ozarksociety.net to learn more about the society’s youth grants. Applications open until Nov. 30. Awards range from $500 to $2,500.
Ozarks at Large transcripts are created on a rush deadline and edited for length and clarity. Copy editors utilize AI tools to review work. KUAF does not publish content created by AI. Please reach out to kuafinfo@uark.edu to report an issue. The audio version is the authoritative record of KUAF programming.
