Biodiversity Boost for Randolph Students

We are the Massachusetts Urban Conservancy (MUC), a new nonprofit dedicated to building biodiversity and pollinator habitats in urban communities. We are raising funds to acquire our first piece of land! With your help, we want to transform this small, overgrown parcel in an Environmental Justice neighborhood in Randolph, Mass., into a healthy, educational green space full of native plants and pollinators. We need more butterflies and birds!

Funding from this campaign will help pay for tools and equipment to remove invasive plants, plus insurance, closing costs, and eventually buying and planting more pollinator-friendly plants and trees. The land itself has been pledged for donation to MUC (an $11,000 value!).

We hope you can help our efforts to keep this land green. We intend to permanently set aside this and other urban lots for biodiversity, to protect them from development.

Educational Opportunity

We are excited about the educational opportunities of our biodiversity projects. We are pursuing partnerships with teachers in Randolph schools (and are working with teachers in Springfield) to create educational units across a range of topics like nature cycles, pollination, tree life, climate change, animal habitat, water management and much more. Science teachers will use the living laboratories we create as teaching tools. Local students can grow alongside new plants and trees!

We intend for this small biodiversity project to serve as a model for more environment-enriching urban projects, especially in Environmental Justice communities. This is our beginning!

Please join us during our upcoming live zooms with some of our key partners (attendees will not be shown on screen):

Tuesday, Aug. 26, 6–6:30 p.m.: A conversation with MUC founders Doug Quattrochi and Eric Weld.

Friday, Aug. 29, noon–12:30 p.m.: With guest Don Sanders, donor of our Randolph property.

Thursday, Sept. 4, 5–5:30 p.m.: With guest Nate Fournier, owner/operator of Reimagined Roots, an organic landscaping company based in West Boylston.

Thursday, Sept. 18, 5–5:30 p.m.: Tom Chase, executive director, and Tripti Thomas-Travers, program director, Microhabitat Accelerator, at Village and Wilderness, a nonprofit forum for biodiversity organizations.

Why Does Biodiversity Matter?

The word “biodiversity” covers a lot of ground. But all it means is the diversity of plant and animal species that have developed on earth over 4.5 billion years. This diversity creates the conditions for life. It’s how we have breathable air, potable water, healthy food and raw materials for clothing, shelter and medicine, not to mention psychological benefits.

But human impacts are depleting our planet’s biodiversity. We are in the middle of a huge extinction event, in which many plant and animal species are dying out. According to Wikipedia estimates, we could lose 30% of all species on earth by 2050 at the current rate of extinction. It is already diminishing food supply, water quality, protection from diseases and other vital resources.

We want to reverse this trend by restoring biodiversity, starting in our cities and towns.

Why Does THIS Land Matter?

We understand, this isn’t a very attractive tract of land – yet. It’s overgrown with invasive plants, weeds and vines. It’s strewn with random logs, tree limbs and rocks. But it’s a wild green space right in the heart of a residential neighborhood. We want to keep it that way, and make it a healthier and more diverse ecosystem. If we don’t protect this land, it’s sure to be cleared and prepped for another building and more low-density sprawl.

This campaign isn’t only about the land itself. It’s also about the people who live in cities and towns in need of protected green space. It’s about public awareness, and getting more people to join us in our mission to restore the health and biodiversity of our wild spaces.

To rebuild biodiversity, we need to protect urban lots like this one right where people live. We want to expose urban residents – the neighbors of this land – to the benefits of healthy green space in their neighborhoods, to enlist their engagement in our objective to build back biodiversity and pollinator habitats.

Fundraising allocation:

What Is MUC All About?

The Massachusetts Urban Conservancy (MUC) started in 2025 with a unique idea: to focus on restoring biodiversity and pollinator habitats in cities and towns. Most people on earth live in urban areas. Yet, urban centers are lacking biodiversity and steadily losing what species diversity they have. As a result, many people in cities – especially Environmental Justice communities – live with inadequate air quality that leads to higher rates of respiratory disease, hotter temperatures with no shade, less social activity, and downstream impacts like poorer economies and worse academic performance.

We want to reverse this trend! We are a small, growing team embarking on a series of small, low-cost projects like this one, in partnership with urban residents, teachers and biodiversity professionals to bring butterflies, birds and biodiversity back to our cities!

Who Are We?

Eric Weld, President

Eric Weld has been a lifetime advocate for a cleaner, wilder environment, a nature and adventure writer for more than 20 years, and a lover of and participant in nature and the outdoors since early childhood. Throughout his lifetime of adventures – circumnavigating the globe twice, living on four continents, summiting Mt. Fuji, bicycling across the U.S., thru-hiking the Appalachian Trail – he has sought out and spent countless hours in nature: forests ancient and new, among animals wild and domesticated, at high elevations and well below sea level. He aims to maximize his time spent outdoors, with an inherent and deeply ingrained interest in biodiversity. As a father of two, he also has personal interest in fortifying the earth’s environment and livability for the sake of generations to come. Weld lives in Easthampton in his idea of the perfect location: a wildlife preserve abutting his back yard and a bike path across the street.

Doug Quattrochi, Treasurer

Doug Quattrochi has known his place in the natural world since his early childhood days exploring the woods behind his parents’ house. He has actively maintained extensive gardens and houseplant collections every place he ever lived. Quattrochi has demonstrated a lifelong commitment to public service and education by co-founding the nonprofit MassLandlords in 2014, where he has personally participated in educational events, serving more than 10,000 landowning event attendees, with special emphasis on decarbonization. He is excited to lend time and expertise to MUC as a needed complement to his main work of helping real estate know its place on our shared earth. He is a resident of Worcester, and a member of the Native Plant Trust.