[August 12, 2024]
Hillsdale resident Andrea Wall has been awarded the 2024 Portland Parks Foundation PGE Parks Champion Award for her work with Friends of Fanno Creek Headwaters.
In 2016, Wall created the nonprofit Friends of Fanno Creek Headwaters to marshal volunteers and financial resources to support restoration efforts benefitting the headwaters of Fanno Creek, a tributary that starts in Hillsdale and eventually feeds into the Tualatin River.
In its announcement of the award, Portland Parks Foundation credits Wall and her group with restoration efforts that have improved stormwater management and creek bank erosion as well as for their contributions to educational engagements for youth, teens, and community members.
In 2009 SW Trails PDX cleared a trail in the right of way south of SW Beaverton-Hillsdale Hwy at SW 25th Ave. In 2017, volunteers from that group secured $20,000 in funding and installed steps through the ravine next to Beaverton-Hillsdale Highway to improve access. The well-used 25th Ave Trail is now a Safe Routes to School route for students at Robert Gray Middle School that provides a quarter-mile footpath from BH Highway to SW Vermont St, passing through areas replanted with thousands of native plants to replace ivy. Other features of the trail are a native pollinator garden, a "bug hotel", glow-in-the-dark solar pebbles, and almost 100 stairs reaching down to Fanno Creek.
Wall and her group have continued to manage and improve the trail as part of their restoration work, making it a springboard to engage the broader community in a variety of restoration and education programs that will maintain and improve neighborhood green spaces.
Visit this page to learn more and support the mission of Friends of Fanno Creek Headwaters to help save, restore, and educate about the importance of urban green spaces in the Fanno Creek Watershed.
Wall’s award will be donated to support Fanno Creek.
—Valeurie Friedman
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