23 Aug Latino Conservation Week 2018

There is so much behind-the-scenes work to planning an event. I spent the day before the event stuffing gift bags with information and goodies. In my eyes, our Latino Conservation Week event was a success. We had a great turn out despite the bad weather in the early morning. I’m happy that we still had people come out for a day of family fun. Amy and I were the first employees on the scene the day of the event. We showed up earlier than scheduled because we both wanted everything to go as smoothly as possible.

Last year, the Friends of Fire Island National Seashore hosted a Multicultural Day at Sailors Haven. That event was a lot of fun, and we wanted to do something similar this year. I collected participant feedback from the Multicultural Day event. With that information we were able to assess what we needed to work on. We took everyone’s suggestions into consideration, and I believe we learned from it. This year we made sure that our participants knew to bring food for our “potluck lunch.” We had so much food! Most of the participants got seconds, and there was still food left over. Lucky for us, because it meant that we got to enjoy some of the delicious food too. I really enjoyed this part of the day because everyone ate together like a family. I also loved that my coworkers ate the food and enjoyed it just as much, if not more, than I did. The arts and crafts were a huge hit (shout out to Amy for the great ideas). It was nice that we had activities that allowed families to get out of the sun for a while. I do wish we had more participants on our other programs, but I’m happy that we got people to Fire Island National Seashore. The first step is letting everyone know what resources we have available. Many of the participants were first time visitors, and were grateful for the opportunity to visit.