Your Contribution

  • Volunteering

    If you’re interested in volunteering at the prairie, please do so!

    You may help the prairie with:

    • Maintenance of native species, and
    • the removal of nonnative species
    • Animal identification and inventory
    • General aesthetic maintenance with planting, weeding, etc.

  • Employment

    Interpreters are employed to open and close the facility, guide visitors around the prairie and talk about the inside exhibits when JWP is open to public. Employees also do housekeeping and vegetation management. Typically, we have several employees, each with a particular day of the week as their 5 hour shift. The Interpretation Center, from the parking area. Immediately around the outside is a garden within a concrete wall.

     

  • Neighbors

    Neighbors of the Prairie have special opportunities to help, because what goes on immediately adjacent to the Prairie has an impact on it. Neighbors that remove shrubs from the border fence will help the Prairie. We thank those neighbors who have done so.

Friends of the Prairie Heading link

Person Learn about some great individuals who have helped and contributed to the Prairie greatly below.
Bernice Benedict Popelka Bernice Benedict Popelka was instrumental in saving this endangered piece of prairie more than a half century ago. Without her vision, persistence and hard work, Woodworth Prairie would not exist. She wrote a definitive book published in 2011 called Saving Peacock Prairie as it was formerly know. It recounts how it was saved and how this benefits today's scientists, photographers, school children and other visitors.
Dr. Albert S. Rouffa Director of UIC's James Woodworth Prairie from 1968 until 1999.