July 26, 2010
National Public Lands Day
National Public Lands Day (NPLD) is the nations largest hands-on volunteer effort to improve and enhance public lands. It gives more than 170,000 volunteers the opportunity to get outside, explore America's Great Outdoors through local and national parks helping improve the nations public lands. Activities will be planned at more than 2,300 sites across the nation. NPLD is on September 25th this year.

We feel National Public Lands Day is the perfect event to highlight many of our Presidents initiatives including Let's Move Outside, United We Serve, and America's Great Outdoors. National Public Lands Day 2010 celebrates service and recreation on public lands. This annual event engages a diverse audience of adult and youth volunteers to get to outdoors and improve their lands, whether at the grandest national park or at an urban park in their neighborhood and inspires a new generation of volunteers committed to service on public lands.

This year, we want to start a new tradition of encouraging volunteers to explore and enjoy America's natural wonders through outdoor recreation. After working hard, volunteers can take a hike, a swim, a bicycle ride and get healthy in America's backyard.

We want to start working with all of our federal agency contacts early to start identifying National Public Lands Day locations that we can collectively invite agency and department leaders to attend. We currently have over 800 sites registered, many of which are already listed at www.publiclandsday.org. More sites are coming in everyday. Of course, the sooner we can place VIPs at sites, the better job we can do promoting the fact.

In addition to attending an event, we'd also like to explore additional opportunities for agency participation, particularly promoting National Public Lands Day to the American public.