Since its founding in 1992, the Ecological Landscape Alliance has been a leader in promoting sustainable approaches to landscape design, construction, and management. ELA’s commitment to innovative ideas and evidence-based practices has made the organization both a trusted resource and a vibrant community of landscape professionals and devoted gardeners. ELA’s members and participants include designers, horticulturalists, growers, and manufacturers; conservationists, restoration ecologists, and wetland scientists; community activists and home gardeners; and landscape stewards for public, private, and nonprofit organizations.
In 2013, ELA launched a nation-wide webinar program, A Focus on Sustainability. Currently, the webinars are a collaboration of Regional Partners in the Midwest, Mid-Atlantic, and California; however, we are always interested in adding the participation and perspective from other regions.
This is a quick overview of webinar participation:
- There is no cost of any kind to regional partners. The intent is that we create a nation-wide program with content that is of interest to a broad range of landscape professionals and amateur gardeners.
- Regional Partners provide one or more active members on the Focus on Sustainability webinar committee.
- Committee members participate in monthly planning conference calls during the height of webinar planning season (typically four meetings, March through June and additional communication is via email)
- Regional Partners actively participate in identifying webinar topics and speakers
(topics can be of nationwide or regional interest). - Regional Partners actively participate in moderating webinars of topics they submit
(training to be provide by ELA) - The benefits (beyond providing free and low-cost ecological education) are that the webinar series is a valuable free benefit to an organization’s members and for ELA it has been a significant driver in increasing ELA membership.
- Members of Regional Partner organizations have free access to all webinar (including a 6-year library of archived webinar recordings). Non-members are charged $10 per webinar. Registration for the webinars is done locally through the Regional Partner website and ALL proceeds from non-member registrations are retained by the Regional Partner.
- There is no requirement to promote any webinar that you don’t think would have interest to your constituents but since there is no charge for you to include them, you might find interest in some that you hadn’t anticipated. In general, the topics are of broad appeal. For instance the program presented by Doug Johnson from PlantRight in California (Keeping Invasive Plants out of the Landscape) discussed not only what California has done but provided practical steps that could be taken in other States.
If you are interested in learning more about our organization or the webinar series, contact us at ela.info@comcast.net to discuss in more detail.
