2024-2025 Grant Recipient Projects
Border Community Alliance
Celebrate the Santa Cruz Valley Heritage Arts, Culture & Food Series:
With this funding, Border Community Alliance (BCA) will create a series of arts, culture, and food forums/tours that highlight the heritage of our region. BCA’s goal with this project is to educate about, promote, and preserve the Santa Cruz River Valley area by providing programming that highlights the wonderful, diverse, and numerous cultures in the Santa Cruz River Valley. This project will provide programming including music, dance, public/private art, and borderlands literature and films in rural and smaller communities within the Santa Cruz National Heritage Area that don’t typically receive host programming. BCA will work with partners to bring borderlands artists, writers, food heritage experts, chefs, film producers, musicians, and others to these communities to provide educational forums and performances that highlight the area’s arts, food heritage, and cultures.
Children’s Museum of Tucson
Interpretive Adventure Learning Tours and Outreach (ALTO) Programs:
Children’s Museum Tucson (CMT) will utilize SCVNHA funding to provide free, bilingual field trips and outreach tours to an estimated 9,000 children attending Head Start programs and Title I elementary schools within the Santa Cruz Valley National Heritage Area. Funds will be used for three Adventure Learning Tours and Outreach (ALTO) programs — Marvelous Murals, Desert Scientists, and Desert Dwellers. These programs focus on our children’s connection to their environment, cultural traditions, and community in the SCVNHA.
Through ALTO, CMT offers programs in which Museum educators provide engaging, interactive STEAM lessons that align with Arizona education standards. For tours, ALTO provides field trips where students travel to CMT. For outreach, Museum educators bring the Mobile Outreach Vehicle to local schools, libraries, or community centers and include activity materials for the participants. Programs are offered in both English and Spanish. Tours and outreach programs are offered with a variety of themes and are targeted to different age groups.
Coalition for Sonoran Desert Protection
Further Enhancement of a Critical Wildlife Corridor in the Santa Cruz Watershed:
This project will build on the momentum created by the 2023-2024 cycle Santa Cruz Valley National Heritage Area grant funding, further protecting the long-term stewardship of and investment in the Oracle Road wildlife crossings by addressing new issues and measuring the impact of previous work. Volunteer-driven Habitat Restoration Days will be held to maintain and further improve native habitat on the Oracle Road wildlife crossings and to address recent damage caused by a fire break, including holding educational workshops on a variety of topics. Quarterly cleanups along Oracle Road adjacent to the wildlife underpass will take place to remove invasive species and trash, and survey wildlife fencing for maintenance needs. CSDP will maintain and monitor an established network of remote wildlife cameras on and near both crossings to produce data on wildlife movement in the area before and after restoration efforts.
Los Descendientes de Tucson
Sosa-Carrillo House Historical Placemaking and Renovation:
The goal of this project is to restore and reinvigorate the front yard of the Sosa-Carillo House to create a community-oriented space. This project involves renovating the front yard of the Sosa-Carrillo House, which is officially listed in the National Register of Historic Places. The front yard project is part of a larger remodel to the entire Sosa-Carrillo House space to ensure the maintenance and preservation of the adobe while bringing the space up to ADA standards. The restoration of the front yard will result in an interpretation and partial re-creation of the space as it existed in the early 1900s, known colloquially as “La Calle.” New signage explaining site history will build awareness of the demolished Barrio, the significance of the plants chosen for the front yard, and the importance of landscape and historic preservation for current and future generations. A community garden will build awareness for conservation of the Sonoran Desert and the important uses of native plants. A partnership between Mission Garden and Los Descendientes will allow museum docents and other interested parties to be trained by Mission Garden regarding the care and importance of the native plants chosen for the front yard. A gardening club will be formed at the conclusion of this training, encouraging members and community to feel ownership of and pride in the front yard.
Mission Garden
Youth Garden Revision:
Mission Garden will enhance its Youth Garden by adding interactive multisensory elements for young people aged three to ten. These new activities will help young visitors learn more about their region’s agricultural and cultural heritage, fostering a more resilient future for the Santa Cruz Valley National Heritage Area. With this project, Mission Garden will create three-to-five weather-resistant, multi-sensory, and interactive elements that will engage a variety of senses and types of activities.
Sonoran Institute
Santa Cruz River Dragonfly Festival with Bugs & Bites Night of Insect Education:
Sonoran Institute’s (SI) annual, month–long Dragonfly Festival works to connect locals and interested visitors to our natural environment and the species that have returned with the revitalization of the Santa Cruz River. At this year’s Bugs & Bites, a free, central event of the Dragonfly Festival, SI hosted scientists and entomologists Jorge Jimenez Canales from Hermosillo, Mexico and Rocío J. Guzmán Ojeda from UA. With bilingual interpretation provided by the Tucson Language Justice Collective, the speakers presented current research involving life cycles and environmental impacts on different species native to or found in the Santa Cruz River and its surrounding area. They also discussed related breakthroughs in medicine and the arts. The interactive evening was open to all ages of bug enthusiasts.
Tubac Nature Center
A Habitat Management Plan for the Tubac Nature Preserve:
This project’s purpose is to create a habitat management plan for Tubac Nature Preserve that supports sustainable management of the 160+ acre habitat. Severe erosion and invasive species threaten the habitat along the river of the Tubac Nature Preserve, creating the need for outside experts to assess the severity of these threats and develop a portfolio of shovel-ready projects that will bring continued funding for restoration activities in the area. The Tubac Nature Center will work with habitat and ecosystem restoration professionals from the Tucson Audubon Society to create this habitat management plan to guide management activities and future restoration at the site. Restoration professionals will lead a series of community restoration events that promote long-term site stewardship and a deeper ecological understanding of the Santa Cruz River.
Tucson Audubon Society
Expanding Bringing Birds Home: Translating and Enhancing Tucson Audubon’s Urban Bird and Pollinator Habitat Recipe Cards:
Tucson Audubon Society (TAS) will build upon its 10 existing “Recipe Cards” that were created in response to data collected from the Tucson Bird Count to equip community members with the knowledge to create and enhance urban habitat for birds, pollinators, and other wildlife. This project will fund the continuation, updating, translation, and increased accessibility of the Recipe Cards for creating safe urban habitat for birds and pollinators. TAS will expand on the Recipe Cards by creating bilingual, native seed packets that correlate to a specific Recipe Card, helping catalyze community action towards creating bird and pollinator habitat.
Tucson City of Gastronomy
Pueblos del Maíz Fiesta:
SCVNHA funding will support the fourth year of the Pueblos del Maíz Fiesta, a bilingual festival produced by the nonprofit Tucson City of Gastronomy (TCOG) to celebrate and preserve the gastronomy, history, and food cultures of corn in Southern Arizona. TCOG’s programming includes a variety of food demonstrations, live music, arts, and crafts, including cultural performances and educational events free to the public. This event also connects Tucson with other internationally designated gastronomy cities and links the UNESCO Creative Cities of Gastronomy and Délice networks through a collaborative celebration and sharing of each city’s maize food traditions, cultures, and cuisines. This festival is held during the second week of April with activities in downtown Tucson and several other venues across eastern Pima County. The festival occurs between, and connects with, the annual Agave Heritage Festival and International Tucson Mariachi Conference.
Tucson Symphony Society
Santa Cruz Watershed Soundscape: Building Hydro-Local Community through Music and Watershed Science:
Tucson Symphony Society’s (TSS) project creates a multidisciplinary platform to explore ecological stewardship and restoration, fusing watershed science with sensory experiences to promote educational outreach grounded in Tucson’s unique sense of place. TSS will engage high school-age and community musicians to actively participate in musicmaking, fueling curiosity around the issue of watershed stewardship in our region. The Tucson Symphony Orchestra will lead a consortium of community concert bands to commission a new musical piece exploring ecosystem stewardship and restoration in the Santa Cruz River Watershed. The piece will be performed in multiple concerts throughout the Santa Cruz Valley during the spring of 2025, including marquee performances at the TSO’s Young People’s Concerts in downtown Tucson. Concerts will be opportunities to connect audiences with conservation activities and information, creating synergy across a variety of public events and fostering increased stewardship of our local watershed. Developing ties between schools, families and community partners will help build a stronger constituency for water and environmental conservation.
Vail Preservation Society
Rehabilitation and a Community Youth Corps: Activating the Old Vail Post Office, Connecting Vail’s Mexican American Borderlands History to Its Future:
The 1908 Old Vail Post Office, located on Tohono O’odham ancestral lands and Vail’s sole surviving link to its pre-statehood past, was the focal point for an over 425 square mile ranching, mining, railroad Borderlands community and the perfect interpretive prism for the region’s diverse history. The Old Vail Post Office is now being rehabilitated to become the Vail Welcome & Heritage Center. Funding from the Santa Cruz Valley National Heritage Area will go toward phase two efforts of the rehabilitation. Phase two will be the starting point for finishing exterior bricks and mortar work, lime plastering the exterior, and development of a participatory, youth-focused, experience-based, volunteer cadre.
Students from the Vail School District will engage in heritage preservation and interpretive design, gaining skills in public history and historic preservation. The resulting creation of interpretive materials highlighting the building’s multi-layered history will include the input from youth, thus creating a cross generational stewardship culture.