 |
Two new faces -
Baroness Young of Old Scone &
Kabir Kaul |
Hey everyone.
Well yesterday I wrote about
Inspirational #IWill and what a great day I'd had. Well my day didn't end when the event at Kew did. I have #IWill to thank in a way for making it possible for me to attend a second event in the evening...
A little while back Dad and I got an invitation to attend an event with the BTO at the House of Lords! Amazing right, but in London on a school night evening.Would we be able to get down? Would I get permission to be out of school early? But then the penny dropped. "What date was that?" said Mum, "The 13th? Well you're in London anyway!" Brilliant! Solved all the problems thanks to #Iwill. So we gladly accepted the invitations and waited for the big day.
 |
Great to catch up with Natalie Bennett -
thanks for all your support on twitter |
Earlier this year I got to go to Portcullis House, a part of Parliament, but I'd never so far got to go into either of the Houses of Parliament so this was exciting. But so was the event. The BTO are an organisation that our family has been a member of for a number of years. I've got involved with a few of their surveys and of course got to go to one of their brilliant bird camps for young people. If you are a young birder I'd highly recommend getting along to one. Sponsored by the Cameron Bespolka Trust they give you lots of great experiences in a full-on birding weekend and you meet a lot of young birders too.
The event on Tuesday though was about change. It started with security checks of course before getting to the venue and a bit of networking and catching up with lots of familiar friendly faces from the birding world and meeting up with a few new ones too. Of course we had to stop for a while to hear the speakers and the reason for us being there.
 |
Some great speakers with great messages including
Caroline Lucas |
There are regular headlines about how the natural world is struggling, really quite scary headlines. Baroness Young of Old Scone kicked off the evening highlighting this but also how the scale of the problems wouldn't be known nor would the effects of conservationist's actions be capable of being tracked without the work of organisations like the BTO. Lots of volunteers (60,000 in fact) like me and others there contribute to their scientific work that makes a real difference. The problem though is that while they engage with lots of people, and have collected really useful data over a long time, people and politicians don't always realise how valuable this data is. The second speaker Caroline Lucas underlined that and like she does on many important green issues is supporting the BTO and trying to raise awareness of the importance of this work continuing.
 |
Great to catch up with other young birders,
Andy & the Bespolkas |
The final words of the night were by another great speaker, Andy Clements, the BTO Chief Executive. He covered 10 key actions that make up the BTO Agenda for Change. I'm sure they'll be up on their website soon but they are basically a commitment to keeping on doing what they do well and to do some things they don't do quite as well, better. I think this will be a challenge. They are an amazing organisation, very supportive, very well respected and to set themselves the challenge of being better I think is a tough one.
One of the 10 actions though I will write out as it was very relevant to the day and to my passions :-
"We will become much more accessible and relevant to wider society, inspiring a new generation to participate in the understanding of, and engagement with, the natural world."
If you think of any way I can help with that #IWill.
Thank you so much for the invite Baroness Young of Old Scone, I had a great evening.
Hope you enjoyed.
Z.
No comments:
Post a Comment