Our Crowdfunding Groups
Who are we?
Systemic historical inequities have denied many members of our campus community equitable access to nature. Providing students with the opportunity to discover our local urban biodiversity, and empowering them to share this knowledge with our community, is the goal of Cal Poly Pomona Fall Bat Week. Each year, 20 students learn about and experience bat research, build bat conservation tools (bat boxes), and then plan and lead a fun campus bat evening outreach event. This year the students provided a variety of activities including: bat walks, a bat predator-prey game, a scavenger hunt for the plants that moths pollinate (a major part of bats diet), a show n' tell with bat boxes, and an arts and crafts tent. The project was dreamt up by two professors who love bats: Dr Rachel Blakey (Cal Poly Pomona) and Dr Joy O'Keefe (University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign).
How can you help?
After running an extremely successful inaugural program, we need help funding our next season and allowing the students to conduct ongoing research. We need bat detectors for both the students and the participants, so that folks can learn all about bat echolocation. The students also need equipment for nocturnal activities including spotlights and head lamps, plus we need to replace the vinyl cutter in our Maker Studio, so that we can cut some more of our extremely popular bat stickers, designed by one of our Cal Pol Pomona students! We would also like to fly co-leader of the project Dr O'Keefe over from Urbana-Champaign to inspire the students again in 2024, the students insist on it! Finally, in order for our Fall Bat Week to be inclusive to all students, we want to pay our participants for their labor building bat boxes and educating the public. If we exceed our fundraising goal, we can also pay a student coordinator to run our bat box monitoring program and conduct research on the results!
Your support can really make our day take flight – thank you for being our 'wing-ding' hero!"
*Art by Jaime Neill (who is studying bats in agroecosystems for her Masters at Cal Poly Pomona)
Pays for a head lamp for one of our students - they get to keep them to continue with their nocturnal naturalism after the event!
Pays for one spotlight for a student leading the bat walks, so they can spot the bats as we record them!
Pays for one heterodyne detector to be used by our community members to detect their own bats during the bat walk!
Pays for the stipend for one student. Only a fraction of students have the time or resources to volunteer their time, paying students makes this program accessible to our target students! All Battastic contributors get a set of rainbow bat stickers, designed and made by Cal Poly Pomona students.
Pays for a new vinyl cutter for Cal Poly Pomona's Maker Studio. Our Maker Studio is top notch, but we need to upgrade their vinyl cutter so that we can print bezillions of our incredibly popular bat stickers, designed by a Cal Poly Pomona student artist. As a #BatHeaven contributor, you will receive a rainbow colored array of bat stickers, and a beautiful Fall Bat Week poster acknowledging your contribution.
If you're a business, or just a high roller, then your contribution could help us purchase a specialized bat detector for our student leaders, or to host our co-leader Dr Joy O'Keefe (by popular student demand), so that she can inspire the students another year! As a #BossBat contributor, you will receive a rainbow colored array of bat stickers, and a beautiful Fall Bat Week poster acknowledging your contribution. We'll also display posters of your business or cause and give you a shout out at Fall Bat Night 2024!
