Karen Brisbane, Landcare Corporate Partnership Facilitator at Goulburn Broken Catchment Management Authority, has just returned from a twenty-six day trip under the auspices of the Landcare Fellowship to the USA. Karen was chosen to represent Victoria by a steering committee and was sponsored by a small group of dedicated individuals within Landcare.
Karen Brisbane, Landcare Corporate Partnership Facilitator at Goulburn Broken Catchment Management Authority, has just returned from a twenty-six day trip under the auspices of the Landcare Fellowship to the USA. Karen was chosen to represent Victoria by a steering committee and was sponsored by a small group of dedicated individuals within Landcare.
This is the third year the fellowship has been conducted. The aim of the fellowship is to witness first-hand projects that could be adopted in Australia, to share project ideas, enlighten our counterparts in the USA about what we do in Australia and to compile suggestions for future fellowship trips.
Karen stayed with locals as she visited five States within the USA, including Springfield in Missouri, Lawrence in Kansas, Seattle in Washington, Portland in Oregon and Arcata in North California.
Karen Brisbane said, "It has been enormously valuable to talk to the various agencies and departments about their agriculture projects. I visited farms, catchment projects, community projects, county offices, mountains, sounds??, beaches, forests and met with around 250 agency and community people who all gave me fantastic feedback on their projects."
Highlights of the trip for Karen included:
- Attending the Land Trust Alliance Rally where 1,700 natural resource management organisations met for 5 days for a conference.
- Walks through a national park with the tallest trees - Redwoods
- Stayed on a working beef / cropping farm
- Visited a recycling depot - ( Victoria appears well ahead in comparison)
- Walked through an area that has been reclaimed after years of industry contamination which the community of Seattle are reinvigorating.
Karen has compiled a report that she will present at an International Landcare meeting in December and the National Landcare Conference in Adelaide in April 2010.
Karen is currently collating information she collected during her trip to share with her colleagues in the region. This includes Stormwater education, children's activities water quality programs and farm training courses.
Karen said, "I have already given information to people in the USA on projects such as Local Area Planning, our education tools, Biodiversity Action Planning and reports on Landcare. While in the USA I held workshops on some of our projects we conduct in the Goulburn Broken and distributed about 50kgs of printed material at these presentations."
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