Our Mission
Great Plains Restoration Council is based in Houston and Fort Worth, Texas.
Mission Statement: Great Plains Restoration Council (GPRC) works to restore and protect shattered prairies and plains through developing youth leaders in Ecological Health. Protecting wild nature is a matter of public health, and participating in its hands-on recovery offers therapeutic modalities for many social and physical ills.
Ecological Health is “the interdependent health of humans, animals and ecosystems”. GPRC is one of the main founders of the emerging Ecological Health movement.
GPRC’s ecological work is:
- Fort Worth Prairie Park (Fort Worth, TX)
- Oglala Prairie Preserve (expansion of Badlands National Park, SD)
- Esteban Park (Houston Coastal Prairie, TX)
- Southern High Plains Preserve (Northeastern New Mexico)
- Saltwater Country: Bringing Wild Buffalo Back to the Beach (Texas Gulf Coast)
GPRC’s social work is:
- Restoration Not Incarceration™
- Plains Youth InterACTION™
Work in nature heals lives, promotes health, provides grounding, focuses attention, earns self-value, and reduces violence and recidivism.
Wild nature, in turn, recovers from an onslaught of potentially annihilating forces.
Responding to the recession while deciding to focus on core strengths and areas of greatest need, GPRC completed a programmatic restructuring in 2009. Henceforth, all GPRC ecological work is to be done through our two social work programs, Plains Youth InterACTION (PYIA) and Restoration Not Incarceration (RNI) and is dedicating itself solely to the Southern Plains.
“Great Plains Restoration Council helps damaged young people heal themselves through healing our damaged native prairies and plains.
GPRC’s Ecological Health approach looks at improving the health of three interlocking social ‘ecosystems’:
- Personal self (physical, mental, emotional, spiritual),
- Community (relationships – with others and self),
- Native prairie ecosystems (the living, breathing, and very damaged natural world).
GPRC combines clinical psychosocial work with state-of-the-art restoration ecology and conservation biology.
GOAL: Set up an innovative network of professional social workers and restoration ecologists/conservation biologists.
Goals-oriented measurement and evaluation processes are woven into work that is research and outcome driven.
America’s Prairies and Plains are the most severely damaged and least protected of any major ecosystem, with several specific prairie ecosystems on the brink of extinction. Many native prairie wildlife and plant species are also threatened with the “extinction spiral’. Protecting and restoring native prairies sizeable enough to allow the reintroduction of wild bison serves as an umbrella protection mechanism for other prairie wildlife like prairie dogs, grassland nesting birds, etc.
GPRC’s conservation work is targeted at specific prairie projects of high conservation value and need.
Social Entrepreneurship: GPRC’s social entrepreneurship blends 1.) Skills training, 2.) Social work in a trust and motivational environment properly implemented, and 3.) work in nature.
