Celebrate National Pollinator Week!

It's National Pollinator Week in the midst of Pollinator Month and we know all you WiWiC Queen Bees are celebrating by snapping photos of the pollinators working hard on your farms and in your gardens. We have a few other ideas, too!

Wisconsin Women in Conservation is proud to be a part of the Wisconsin Monarch Collaborative (WMC), a community of monarch conservationists: individuals and community members, Master Naturalists and Master Gardeners, teachers, researchers, land managers, non-profit organizations, and anyone who is passionate about protecting and bolstering monarchs. The main emphasis of the Collaborative’s work is HABITAT, both in the form of milkweed stems for eggs and caterpillars, and a diverse matrix of nectar plants that provide food for the adults. We need both, we need it everywhere, and we need everyone's help!

This year WMC started a brand-new program to help get more habitat planted, Safe for Monarchs. We worked with local Wisconsin nurseries to create a certification program for plants they sell that are safe and hospitable for monarch butterflies and caterpillars. You can see the list of nurseries HERE and have fun shopping and planting!

Pollinator Week is also a great time to get signed up for the next two 2026 WiWiC Summer Camp webinars, organized in collaboration with Xerces Society and featuring all things INVERTEBRATES! RSVP separately to get the links HERE and learn all about Grazing with Bugs in July and Night Pollination in August. We'll be sending out the replay of the first webinar on Habitat Planning soon.

Finally, we think a great way to celebrate Pollinator Month is to support WiWiC with a donation! If you have been thinking of making a gift during our Spring Fund Drive, this is the last week to do it. Of course, it's not Spring any more - it's Summer! But we're leaving our Fund Drive open until the end of June because we haven't yet reached our $6,000 goal.

As you many remember, WiWiC was a federally funded program started in 2021 as a collaboration between four non-profit agriculture groups. When the funding contract was terminated early last April, Michael Fields Agricultural Institute - the lead organization for the project - decided it was just too good to let go! Since then, individual donors and small family foundations and non-profits have sustained us. You have sustained us! You're the bee's knees!

In the past year, we've grown by 1,000 participants (to over 5,000 total) and launched Illinois Women in Conservation. Read a recent article on the launch HERE.

Please give this Spring to help us support travel for facilitators and outreach for the many amazing events coming up this Summer and Fall. Become a monthly recurring donor and get one of our beautiful hand-drawn WiWiC bandanas. See you in the field soon!