For the third year in a row, BPFP’s “Greening Berkeley Hands On” partnership has been awarded a Chancellor’s Community Partnership Fund grant by UC Berkeley. This year’s award of $24,000 will help BPFP affiliates carry out a wide variety of hands-on environmental projects. The grant pays for both materials and a UC student intern, who organized student volunteering through CalCorps, UC’s public-service arm.
Projects in the 2008 grant range from path construction and a solar light for the Santa Fe Right of Way, projects of Berkeley Path Wanderers, to tools and gloves for the city’s 14 public-school gardens, through Friends of School Gardens. The community-built Schoolhouse Creek Common will install chess tables and a bench. Nearby, Friends of Westbrae Commons will continue transforming the Ohlone Greenway south of Gilman with native coastal-prairie plants. Friends of Shorebird Park Nature Center will spread fresh sand and build new racks at Adventure Playground, while Aquatic Park EGRET will get upgraded nataive plants and upgraded wheelbarrows. Friends of Five Creeks will be able to install signs on local natural history and plant drought-tolerant natives in a variety of sites, from the Santa Fe Right of Way to Mortar Rock Park.
Aquatic Park EGRET also will partner with Earth Team Environmental Network, Berkeley Community Media, College of Natural Resources, and Berkeley Community Garden to involve local teens in habitat restoration days that teens also will film for showing on local cable TV. This project received a $5000 Chancellors Community Partnership grant.
Join us to carry out these projects! Contact BPFP or the affiliate group you are interested in — click on “Affiliated Groups” at right.
Meet your neighbors and discuss ideas for the future of SFROW. Grad students from the Landscape Architecture department at UC Berkeley will present their visions.
With the recent dedication of the Santa Fe Right of Way (SF ROW) trail north of University, the time is ripe to complete the last 8-block segment of it to the south. BPFP has been a major advocate for this key open space for years. Now the Berkeley Community Gardening Collaborative (BCGC) is working with BPFP to plan for the transformation of SF ROW south to Sacramento and Oregon Streets for a pedestrian/bicycle pathway along with other community-serving activities (such as community gardening and playgrounds). We are conducting a survey in the surrounding blocks to get a picture of what residents would like to see. In early 2006 we’ll be submitting our recommendation to the Parks Commission to initiate the masterplan for this final segment of a multi purpose corridor that will link south Berkeley to the Ohlone Greenway – enabling people to connect all the way to Richmond! Call Beebo Turman of BCGC at 527-3773 for more information, or John Steere at 849-1969 to get involved.