Adult Conservation Team Newsletter
ACTION
Winter 1998

Dane County Parks Participates in “Wisconsin Promise”

    Last April the “President’s Summit for America’s Future” set goals to provide certain resources for all children. Those goals are: a caring adult, safe places, a healthy start, marketable skills, and the opportunity for youth to serve the community. The first local follow-up event, “Wisconsin Promise”, took place in October in Madison. Both of these summits focused on volunteerism as an important component in achieving these goals, and there has been growing national, statewide and local support for volunteerism. Dane County will hold a summit on local volunteerism later this year.

    A “day of service” was held the day before the Wisconsin summit, coordinated by Operation Fresh Start. Various kinds of volunteer projects took place all around the community. At an Adult Conservation Team project, over 50 youth delegates aided future prairie restoration by removing fence line in the Ice Age Trail Junction Area. The kids came from all over the state and were joined by volunteers from the State Capital Police. The volunteers, supervised by staff and members of Operation Fresh Start, worked hard in the warm autumn sun, digging up fence posts, cutting and rolling up woven and barbed wire. Governor and Mrs. Thompson, a Milwaukee TV station, and Connie Ferris Bailey, the director of Operation Fresh Start, all visited the work site to show their support.

    We at Dane County Parks are continuously encouraged by the willingness of youth to help in the environment. Youth groups, scouts, 4-H club members, students of all ages, are learning that they can have a positive impact on their world. The students of Middleton High School who recently received the Dane County Natural Heritage Foundation’s Youth Stewardship Award for their work in Pheasant Branch Marsh (elsewhere in this issue), are one example among many. We believe that Adult Conservation Team projects make a good start in fulfilling the goals of the President’s Summit for America’s Future.