Summit Park - February

As we’ve said in the past, our community partner is the Dickerson Park Zoo and our main goal is to get more people on the Drury campus and the community to volunteer at the zoo. That being said, volunteering in the winter is tough in a zoo since the weather is so unpredictable, so we have not been able to do much this month. However, we did get to meet with our community supervisor, Chelsea, and discuss our plans for the semester.

The first order of business was figuring out how we will finish renovating the children’s maze. Chelsea wanted to come on a regular basis to finish it, so we decided that we would come every Thursday and work on it until it is completed, starting next week. We also decided that we would hold any future meetings with her on Thursday at the same time to make scheduling easier for both of us and limit any miscommunications.

The second thing we talked about was having a college day at the zoo. We are partnering with SUB to get Drury students into the zoo for free on Saturday, April 7th. We will either have a determined number of tickets purchased and hand them out to Drury students for free, or we will work out with the zoo that all Drury students can get in for free that day if they show their student ID - we are still in the process of figuring out which one will happen. We want to do this event to try and promote the zoo to Drury campus since not everyone knows that there is a zoo in Springfield.

The next thing discussed was getting a zookeeper to bring animals on campus. We found out that they can bring animals such as hedgehogs, chinchillas, snakes, etc. on campus for an hour. We plan to hopefully bring them in on a Friday in April; the exact date and time are still being discussed. We want to do this to attract Drury students attention and have a list of zoo volunteer opportunities to get people interested in volunteering as well as letting them interact with the keepers.

Lastly, we asked Chelsea if there were any zoo events that she especially needed volunteers for. She told us that they are having their National Zoo Lovers Day on April 8th from 10:00 AM - 2:00 PM, so we have volunteered to help with it and celebrate all that zoos do to help animals.

We have big plans for this semester, and are excited to start volunteering and following through with our projects next month!

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