ONSC Facility Assessment Day

We have an exciting day coming up at the Ozark Natural Science Center that has been a long time coming!

On March 28, a fantastic team of professionals will join us at our campus in the Bear Hollow Natural Area to do a complete audit of our facilities.  We'll walk through the Ewing Centre, three lodges, our indoor and outdoor classrooms, parking lot, campfire pavilion and trails to put together an idealistic wish list of all the improvements we'd like to make to our facilities.

Joining us will be folks from the Arkansas Natural Heritage Commission, team members from GE Lighting (be sure to check out GE's awesome ecomagination site), friends from Perkowitz + Ruth architects, board member David Stitt from Stitt Energy and representatives of the NWA chapter of the U.S. Green Building Council. 

As a field science and environmental education facility, you can imagine how much we hate to not be on the cutting edge of sustainable operations.  Since we spend all day every day teaching kids about our mission of enhancing the understanding, appreciation and stewardship of the Ozark natural environment, we want to ensure we are excellent stewards as well.  While our campus was built nearly twenty years ago in a low-impact, intelligent way to take advantage of natural light and minimize impact and we certainly watch our waste, compost and make smart choices, it's time for some upgrades.

Our hope is that this wish list will be something we can work from in the coming years gradually as resources, donated materials, corporate support and other opportunities allow.  It will certainly be a slow but steady plan of attack. 

We would like to identify some ways to capture energy (wind, solar, water) and also find ways to conserve energy and decrease our impact.  Most importantly, we want to incorporate educational tools into everything we do so that our teacher naturalists can actively show visiting students what we're doing every day to reduce our impact, and help inspire them to make changes of their own.

And in the interim, watch for some exciting updates: we'll be working to add rain barrels on-site, unveil a bee-friendly pollinator garden and working bee hives, and implementing phase one of a rain garden thanks to funding support from Cargill, Inc.

It's an exciting time at the Ozark Natural Science Center.  Please let us know if there are ways you, your business or your team could support our efforts to walk the walk, honor our founders and reflect our mission in all that we do!