Avalonia’s SNEC funded Land Stewardship Interns complete their summer 2025 tenure

Our summer interns, funded by Southeastern New England Educational and Charitable Foundation, made an indelible mark on Avalonia’s stewardship efforts during their eleven weeks with us this summer. From annual monitoring to restoration work to boundary posting and bridge building, Coleman Pushlar and Morgan Reynolds were indispensable, performing nearly 60 individual site visits across 26 different preserves, conservation easements, and potential acquisitions. Their role in enhancing our overall stewardship capacity cannot be overstated.

But a well-formed internship is, as you know, not a one-sided affair.  Avalonia’s program is designed to expose interns to the breadth of our stewardship obligations and to give them experiences that they might build from as they develop their professional careers. It is intentionally immersive, seeking to meld the academic with some of the realities of conservation fieldwork. While there is always room for improvement, feedback from our SNEC interns was heartening.

…I was blindsided by the plethora of new information and skills that I developed here. I learned about the inner workings of land management, including the many requirements that a land trust must follow, how acquisition is followed through, and how to continuously update projects … using the application Landscape 3.0.

…my experience this summer with Avalonia provided me with critical skills in plant identification, habitat restoration, logistical understanding of property acquisition, and interpersonal relations. I was also given the opportunity to further explore my own interests…

These are the sorts of affirming things that we want to hear as an organization and are certainly measures of the success of an internship, but delving a bit deeper, Morgan highlighted another important takeaway from the summer experience,

My time with Avalonia this summer demonstrated that, overall, stewardship is about people and community just as much as it is about biological preservation.  This was a critical skill and understanding to build throughout the internship … One of the most important, although sometimes overlooked, components of land stewardship is interpersonal communication between volunteers, visitors, and other stakeholders. I felt very grateful to receive a wide range of experiences regarding this during my time with Avalonia, as it is clearly a necessary piece of the work they do.

That interpersonal or power skills lay at the heart of stewardship is an important understanding and one that even those of us who have made this our calling need to be reminded of! There were, of course, other common themes that emerged. One of which was captured, diplomatically, by Coleman with his observation that,

…land stewardship is anything but straightforward. Each day brings a set of new challenges, new experiences, and a development or refinement of skillsets.  

Whether it was adverse weather, insects, poison ivy, ticks, equipment failure, realizing that you forgot to pack something critical, or the sometimes head spinning emergence of new priorities, the interns came to appreciate the value of the educator’s mantra, “adjust and modify”.  And they did just that with energy and positivity!  Thank you to Morgan, Coleman, and SNEC for another successful internship season.