History
The Northern Rockies Chapter of Wildlands Restoration Volunteers began as a small group of volunteers completing projects. Graham Roy organized his first project in Missoula during the spring of 2008. He organized twenty volunteers to plant native plants along the banks of Bancroft ponds. That fall, over 80 volunteers joined forces to plant seed on Mt. Sentinel with the goal of increasing the number of native plants where it had burned in July. The next year, the group organized additional projects to plant native shrubs with Missoula County and planted native irises at Bancroft Ponds among other projects. In that time the
During these projects, one requirement became clear: volunteer-based restoration requires volunteer leaders to direct all those volunteers and the organizational capacity to acknowledge the efforts of volunteers.
The volunteer group in Missoula trained several crew leaders in 2009, and began to look for ways to organize into an organization, including seeking advice from WRV in Colorado. In 2010, Wildlands Restoration Volunteers decided to form a chapter in the northern rockies region based upon the success the group of volunteers already had in Missoula. WRV brings a wealth of expertise, such as leadership programs and experience designing restoration projects, to the volunteers already doing restoration in the region. The chapter will be able to use these resources to organize more sophisticated projects with larger numbers of volunteers in the future.
