Four years after planting new trees alongside Ames Creek in Carnation, Boeing and Stewardship Partners returned over the weekend to clear away invasive plant species and maintain the trees they had planted.
On April 16, approximately 25 volunteers from Boeing teamed up with Stewardship Partners, a non-profit organization that works with private landowners to help restore and maintain the natural environment of Washington to complete the maintenance work.
Started in 1999, Stewardship Partners has worked with more than 31 landowners in the Snoqualmie Valley, planted more than 125,000 trees and installed habitat buffers like the one they worked on at Ames Creek in 2014.
Chris LaPointe, Snoqualmie Stewardship program manager, explained that the work on the stream-side restoration was driven by the creek’s use as a salmon habitat.
“A lot of the work is driven by salmon habitat recovery, a couple species of salmon spawn and rear their young here and use its tributaries as well,” LaPointe said.
As for Boeing, LaPointe said the company has been involved for years and is a big supporter of the programs that his organization runs.
Four years ago Boeing volunteers made their way out to Ames Creek to work on the stream-side, removing invasive species like Himalayan blackberries and reed canary grass, in a joint effort.
“In 2012 we did our big first planting on this area with Boeing,” he said. “That’s who is with us today for part of their Earth Day celebration. It’s special and important that we have these groups come back to the areas that they planted and now they are performing maintenance on the restoration site which is often overlooked and very underfunded.”
With groups like Boeing involved, these projects become more efficient and are completed on a faster time frame than the Stewardship crew could do alone, LaPointe said.
Samantha Jarema, Business Operations Lead at Boeing and the volunteer team leader for the group at Ames Creek, said Boeing is ramping up community service events in 2016 and they want to do more than come out once a year.
“We have a volunteer connection website available to all Boeing employees and this was one of the events listed on there. Then all of the other folks are people that I know with Boeing.” Jarema said.
“Part of what we do as an organization is try to get involved in different community service events. We do a couple every quarter. This is one of the Puget Sound area events that we are leading. We are trying to lead about three of them.”
LaPointe is happy for the support that Boeing has shown them, not just in this project, but in all of the programs they run including “adopt-a-buffer.”
Boeing has enrolled in the adopt-a-buffer program and as a result, company volunteers are connected with ongoing restoration projects to work on.
Boeing does not just volunteer time to Stewardship Partners but money as well. The company has been a consistent funding source for the organization since 2011.
“They’ve been great funding our programs, they provided seed funding for our adopt-a-buffer program in 2014 which allowed us to build the infrastructure for that program,” he said.
“Now we are in the phase where we are implementing it, reaching out to other businesses and using Boeing as an example of why it’s useful for large corporations in this area to partner with non-profits like Stewardship Partners and for them to get involved in restoration.”
LaPointe is looking forward to the ongoing partnership and working with Boeing volunteers for future events.
“When we have groups like Boeing dedicated to these areas it makes our work a lot easier. The amount of work they do in four hours, our crew of two to three people couldn’t get done in a week or two,” he said. “The crew is very efficient, they do a ton of work and having the person power to do this is just awesome.”
