LAKE TAHOE, Calif./Nev. – Tahoe Fund, a beloved organization who provides major funding for countless environmental projects, just completed their Tahoe Project Madness competition. The community-voted champion is an ALERTWildfire camera.
Tahoe Project Madness is a play on their annual community-voted March Madness, essentially taking 16 projects and using a bracket system to narrow down the projects based on what the community wants. Whichever project wins by community vote gets a $10,000 boost from Tahoe Fund.
“For the last few years we’ve done March Madness, and we’ve done ‘your favorite trails,’ ‘your favorite beaches,’ or ‘your favorite peaks,’ and Jaclyn on our team this year said, ‘I think we should do it about projects, and put money up and get people to vote on a project that’s going to get additional funding from us,'” said Amy Berry, CEO of Tahoe Fund.
They started with the ‘Sweet 16’ bracket, and all 16 projects in the bracket had already received funding at one point from Tahoe Fund. “We have funded, in a combined total, over $700,000 to all those projects, so no one is a loser going in,” Berry said.
From “Sweet 16”, it went down to “Elite Eight” and then “Final Four” before getting down to the final two – Caldor Fire Reforestation with the Sugar Pine Foundation and an ALERTWildfire camera.
As of April 6, thousands of voters have spoken, and they chose University of Nevada, Reno’s ALERTWildfire camera funded in partnership by the Tahoe Prosperity Center (TPC).
TPC has been helping the University of Nevada, Reno place ALERTWildfire cameras around the basin. Last summer, Tahoe Fund teamed up with them to put a camera on the west shore in an area that was missing coverage, although the need for more cameras is still there.
“When Jaclyn came up with the concept of doing this March Madness around projects, we all agreed that the wildfire camera had to be in the project” said Berry. “We had a sense that it might be in the lead, but we didn’t know if it would win or not. As we went bracket by bracket, and the community voted, it just kept rising to the top.”
The $10,000 from Tahoe Fund will go to TPC to help University of Nevada, Reno increase coverage of their ALERTWildfire network, and Berry notes how excited she was to see how the community’s goals lined up so perfectly with their leading priorities.
“We’re super psyched because for the Tahoe Fund, we do projects that improve the health of the lake, and make it easier to get around and enjoy Lake Tahoe, but our number one priority is preventing catastrophic wildfire, and the cameras are just the perfect tool to help us do that,” added Berry. “Because the earlier you can detect a fire, the sooner you can get to it and the smaller it stays.”
To see the full list of projects or to dive deeper into Tahoe Fund’s mission and efforts, visit https://www.tahoefund.org/.
To learn more about University of Nevada, Reno’s ALERTWildfire camera network, go to https://www.unr.edu/nevada-today/nevada-stories/alertwildfire.
You can check out Tahoe Prosperity Center and the work they do by visiting https://tahoeprosperity.org/.
