Remember BCN in Your Holiday Giving

Please remember BCN in your holiday giving plans.  We will kick off our year-end fundraising campaign on Tuesday, November 28, which is Giving Tuesday, with the goal of raising $7,500 to fund our 2024 database development, projects, and operations. Giving Tuesday is an international day of generosity, celebrated annually on the Tuesday after Thanksgiving.

Our all-volunteer coalition had a productive 2023. We look back with a sense of accomplishment!

• We wrapped up a year-long promotion of our Trends Analysis, generating widespread regional news coverage; 24 Trends presentations reached a broad audience, including most of our county land managers.
• Recruited 50 new monitors for the BCN Survey, conducted birding by ear trainings, and organized a postseason recap for first-year monitors.
• Co-sponsored a pilot project to investigate bird population declines in our grasslands and share findings with researchers and land managers.
• Carried out ongoing advocacy related to wind turbine threats, bird collisions, and local hazards to birds.
• Refreshed the BCN brand with an updated logo, new website, and new exhibit materials.
• Launched a quarterly newsletter to communicate about BCN projects, advocacy efforts, and outreach activities.
• Led two sessions at the Wild Things Conference and exhibited at four regional events.
• Explored requirements and possible development strategies for a new BCN Survey database, including team meetings and a face-to-face meeting with eBird leadership.

Our 2024 plans are equally ambitious:

• Focus on database development as a top priority. Most of our funding will be devoted to redesigning and streamlining our database so it is more accessible; these much-needed improvements will make it easier to deploy BCN Survey data to answer research questions and improve bird conservation efforts in the Chicago region.
• Publicize findings of the grassland research project and share widely with land managers.
• Develop additional BCN Survey training content for monitors, improve tracking of site availability, and centralize the tracking of monitor assignments.
• Champion Chicagoland’s major importance as a migratory stopover through presentations and tools that highlight migratory birds’ needs, ways to promote their safe passage, and how to provide quality habitat as they transit through our region.
• Refine and expand our advocacy and outreach efforts to better engage with the public.

As a regional 501c3 nonprofit organization with limited resources, every donation we receive is both highly valued and also has the potential to make a direct impact on bird conservation in the Chicagoland area.

If you have already donated to BCN, either financially or through the time you contributed as a BCN Survey monitor, BCN Representative, or other volunteer, I want to personally thank you for your valuable involvement with us and the difference, both direct and indirect, that you are making for birds.

For those inspired and positioned to be able to donate financially, we invite you to join us. We raised the bar for BCN in 2023; let’s raise it further in 2024 and make positive change happen as we work together for birds and their habitats in Chicagoland. Donations can be made online through our website at https://www.bcnbirds.org/donate.html, or if you would like to donate by check or provide a special donation, please contact us at treasurer@bcnbirds.org.