Some people ask for gifts on their birthday, but Temple’s Scott Hecker had a bigger picture in mind.
When he turned 67 last week, Hecker put out a request for donations to the organization he works for, the International Conservation Fund of Canada, to help fund action to support the environment.
“It’s not so much about the money; it’s about letting people know that there are wonderful things happening,” he said.
The ICFC, of which there is an American branch simply called the International Conservation Fund, collects donations to support projects in the tropics aimed at protecting ecosystems and helping heal the planet’s climate that way.
“It’s about biodiversity and we’re about climate change,” Hecker said. “Most of the weather of our world originates in the Amazon and the big forests in the tropics, so our priority then would be to protect biodiversity, endangered species, tropical ecosystems.”
For Hecker, raising awareness of this work was an important consideration on his birthday. The motto of the organization is “where nature needs us most,” a message that Hecker said encapsulated his feelings on the subject.
“It’s a nice positive message, and I just love it,” he said.
So far, he said he has raised a few hundred dollars, and that he hopes people will continue to learn more about ICFC. He got involved with the organization after spending many years working for Audubon Society chapters protecting piping plovers on New England beaches. One grant he applied for to continue this work happened to be from the ICFC, because of the migratory patterns of plovers which lead them to winter in the Bahamas.
“Before I walked out that door, I said to them, ‘If you ever need anybody to help you with your work, I would be happy and available,’” Hecker said. Two months later, he was an assistant grant-maker with the ICFC.
Hecker focuses largely on his area of expertise, which is conservation in support of migratory birds that winter in the tropics. He said many birds from North America, some of them thought as common, spend their winters in increasingly threatened habitats in the tropics of the planet.
This work is so important, he said, that he wants other people to know as much about it as possible. He happened to have an advertisement handy that he designed for a local campaign in Electric Earth’s program, and decided to run it on his Facebook page for his birthday.
“Lots of people do these things where they have a charity on their birthday,” he said, adding that he intends to keep doing it each year. “I just hope that by my kind of outreach, trying to convey the importance of what we do combined with our success stories and positive aspects of what we do, I hope that people become interested. You just never know when someone’s going to come forth with a very large gift.”
To learn more about ICFC and donate, visit icfcanada.org. To donate to Hecker’s fundraising effort, visit his Facebook page.