Please Vote to Change Our Organization's Name to "Northern Virginia Bird Alliance"

Photo: Pileated Woodpecker, John Troth/Audubon Photography Awards

When: Sunday, June 9, 1:00 PM - 2:00 PM
Where: National Wildlife Federation Building, 11100 Wildlife Center Drive, Reston, VA 20190

This coming Sunday, June 9, at 1:00 pm, ASNV members will meet at the National Wildlife Federation Building, 11100 Wildlife Center Drive in Reston, to vote on whether to adopt “Northern Virginia Bird Alliance” as its new name. ASNV’s Board of Directors voted to recommend this new name and urges you to vote to adopt it. We chose “Northern Virginia Bird Alliance” because it makes clear that our focus is on birds, and that working with people is important. 

We voted in January to drop the Audubon name because our survey results indicated that it was a barrier to participation for some groups in our increasingly diverse northern Virginia area; younger people felt especially strongly that a name change was necessary. Another factor in the Board’s decision was that the “Bird Alliance” label has been adopted by a number of large chapters of the National Audubon Society with tens of thousands of members, including San Francisco, Chicago, Detroit, New York City, and Washington, DC. Therefore our new name will ally us with those organizations in a common objective of conserving birds, their habitats, and the environment.

To make the new name official, we need to have a vote of the current members of ASNV. If you cannot attend you can fill out a proxy form and give it to a member who will attend the meeting (with a paper copy of the proxy vote.) The proxy form is here. You can give the proxy form to any member you choose, but please make sure the member plans to attend before assigning your proxy. Of course, you can vote either “yes” or “no” on adopting this new name. But we hope you will vote to change our name to “Northern Virginia Bird Alliance”. A no vote will not overturn the Board’s decision to drop the Audubon name but will require further deliberation on a new name.