New Sustainability Training for Landscaping Professionals Set for March 2025

ONEONTA – Landscaping professionals will gather in Davenport on March 11–13 for a groundbreaking training on how to use native plants and support natural habitats. As homeowners, business owners, and municipalities become more concerned about taking action for the climate, this conference will give landscapers tools to support the ecosystem through their work.

The training and endorsement program is called HELP, which stands for Habitat and Ecosystems Land Pro training. This training will be held at Hartwick College’s Pine Lake Environmental Campus in Davenport—a location committed to environmental sustainability and ecological awareness. The HELP conference is the result of a collaboration between the Delaware-Otsego Audubon Society and the Theodore Roosevelt Sanctuary & Audubon Center.

The HELP training is the first of its kind offered in upstate New York, and the framework has only recently been developed by Joyann Cirigliano, who is a Senior Coordinator of Bird-Friendly Communities at the Theodore Roosevelt Sanctuary & Audubon Center. Joyann has recently taught this material on Long Island and via Zoom.

Joyann says about the program, “By working with landscape architects, design-and-install companies, and parks and municipal work crews and staff, we can effectively reclaim lost habitat at scale, instead of the previous ‘one yard at a time’ model.”

The Delaware-Otsego Audubon Society felt it was important to share this material with a wider audience, making it available to landscape professionals in all of upstate New York as well as surrounding regions, such as Vermont, Pennsylvania, and Western Massachusetts. The training will be offered both in-person and with a hybrid Zoom option—although in-person attendance will be required on the conference’s final day, when the training will focus on field instruction and workshops on site at the Pine Lake Environmental Campus.

Susan O'Handley, Education Chair of Delaware-Otsego Audubon Society Board of Directors, expressed her excitement about organizing this training: “The exponential impact of working with landscape professionals has the potential to create acres of quality habitat for birds and pollinators in urban, suburban and rural regions, and providing the opportunity to monetize these natural ecological practices can provide support for faster adoption.”

Landscaping professionals who attend this training have the opportunity to earn continuing education credits as well as become endorsed and listed on a collection of online resources associated with the HELP program.

Registration for the upstate New York HELP training is open now and will remain open until all fifty spots are filled. Anyone interested in more information is encouraged to visit the web address www.doas.us/help .