I thought as we head to the festival it would make sense to have a little information about the people who are putting it together. Aside from the fact that we’re dedicated to beavers (and a little insane?) what else is there to know about us? Allow me to introduce the cast of characters and come meet us Saturday in person.
I assume you know me, Heidi Perryman, president and founder of Worth A Dam. I started watching the beavers last summer, wrote some articles about them for the Gazette, and put videos of them on Youtube. When the beaver subcommittee was formed I was invited to be a member. I started thinking about the group when I was still on the subcommittee and there were discussions about watershed grants and available monies only open to non-profits. I talked with Igor Skaredoff of Friends of Alhambra Creek and he explained to me how he uses the existing non-profit Muir Land Trust as a receiving organization, they do the paperwork and have the legal status and take a small book-keeping fee, and Igor just gets to focus on the creek.
After some initial false starts I connected with Bill and Helen Feil of Land for Urban wildlife. Bill is also the president of the “Friends of Pleasant Hill Creeks” and he invited me one night to give a presentation on the Martinez Beavers. Bill is an enthusiastic, knowledgeable, and generous fellow and he agreed to have LUW be the receiving organization for Worth A Dam. We had a few meetings at my house and one at the bank to take care of the paperwork (somewhere in all the confusion I was drafted secretary of Land for Urban Wildlife but I didn’t mind.)
With clearer ideas about how this would work I began to think about putting together the team. Cheryl Reynolds had been watching and filming the beavers with me for several months, and I knew she was an avid birder, prior vet tech and former volunteer for the Lindsay Museum. Not a Martinez resident, she was nevertheless committed to our beavers and made the trek in the wee hours to see them. She agreed to be VP of wildlife. Cheryl worked evenings as a bartender and waitress for Left Bank, and she convinced our first web volunteer to come on board. Bruce set up the original blog back in January, and helped us get words and pictures on the web.
Cheryl was fearless at snapping the right picture or getting the right information, but she said she wasn’t much for writing things down or making persuasive speeches. For that I needed to ask Linda Meza aboard. The idea of co-VPs came to me at 3:30 in the morning again, and made me very happy, as I was struggling to decide which one area was more important, and happy to give them equal weight. Linda’s interest in the beavers had been more recent but she was a solid new-believer. She came to subcommittee meetings and was often at the dam site. At the time, Linda was in a marketing job in San Ramon, and I saw she was bold enough for the both of us. She agreed to be VP of public relations and her unfolding story is still being written.
The obvious choice for treasurer was the very respectable Donna Mahoney, who I remember speaking about feeding the deer at her Orinda home from the November 7th meeting. Donna had the great combination of compassion and business experience, and I noticed her words held weight with the Council. She’s VP of Title Financial Company and had many insights into setting up contracts and getting things done. Donna approached me early in the subcommittee meetings, when I had made a beaver brochure, and asked me if I wanted help printing them. She donated funds and made up a couple hundred.
Around this time, the newly forming Worth A Dam came into some bumpy road and we lost our Bruce and the webpage. Donna suggested we ask her friend Michael Cronin, who had designed a website for her in the past. I knew Michael on sight because he had approached me after a subcommittee meeting and thanked me for the work I had done. Michael became our new web guru and took us from the “typical-looking” blog to the unique webpage we have now.
Early on Bruce had the foresignt to register both martinezbeavers.org/wordpress and martinezbeavers.com, and now that we were an official nonprofit I cajoled Michael to make the switch. It involved backing up all the information and reloading it, and meant the sight had to be down for 8 hours. I was in New Orleans at the time, but it went off without a hitch. We were www.martinezbeavers.org/wordpress, associated with Land for Urban Wildlife, and the rest is history!
After a couple of Worth A Dam meetings I began to get anxious that we were having too many ideas that were getting forgotten, and we decided to add a secretary. Catherine Larson agreed to take on the role and this will be helpful. Kit is one of those very rare things: a beaver convert. She began asking me about them last year, initially concerned about downtown flooding. The more we talked and the more she saw of them, the better she started to feel. Now she is a firm supporter and the secretary of Worth A Dam.
And yes, I did worry that our executive was too female. We are always looking for new ideas. If you’d like to be included in upcoming Worth A Dam meetings, send me an email at mtzbeavers@gmail.com. For right now we’re the right team for the job, and I couldn’t be happier. Come Saturday and see how the team does in action!
