Our Crowdfunding Groups
Who are we?
We are a group of students and professors who love bats and want to share our knowledge and enthusiasm for this important group of animals with our campus and the community! Each year, up to 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 with detectors, lawn games, bat box and specimen interpretation, bat trivia, an arts and crafts tent, and a bat echolocation station. 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) and is being continued by Cal Poly Pomona's own bat club: BATS!
How can you help?
After running an extremely successful program for the last two years, 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! 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 provide our participants with compensation 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!
*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.
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!
