Maya Ogren always had a passion for Iowa’s prairies.

“For her, standing in the prairie felt like standing in the center of the world, where the horizon moved with you. She felt a deep reverence for Iowa’s natural ecosystem,” said Ogren’s daughter, Letia Blanco.

Blanco said her mother is one of the few people she’s heard talk about the prairie in that way.

It helped “drive that sense of real pride in our community and in Iowans to talk about that we have something that is this incredibly beautiful and precious natural space,” Blanco said.

In her 40s, Ogren left her career as a Cedar Rapids attorney to immerse herself in conservation and ecology.

“She just felt the draw that what she was doing with her life was not producing the change in the world that she felt like she really wanted to make,” Blanco said. “So, she actually left her career as an attorney, went back to school at Kirkwood” Community College.

Ogren completed Kirkwood’s naturalist certification, and held several positions within the National Park Service, working at the Tallgrass Prairie in Kansas, and in Texas hill country.

“She really learned a lot about how people were communicating the value of their natural spaces, and she brought those best practices back to us here in Iowa,” Blanco said. “I remember she would talk a lot about how the prairie is so often taken for granted and overlooked.”

As she worked in conservation and fostered her own passion for the natural world, Ogren started work on launching a master naturalist program to focus on Iowa’s environment.

At the same time, Ogren was fighting breast cancer. The disease spread to her bones and caused increasing pain, but Ogren channeled her energy into launching the program.

“It was a very interesting and beautiful moment … You could just watch her pouring her life’s energy, her true spirit, all that she had to leave with the world, this is the thing that mattered the most,” Blanco said.

Blanco said it was in Ogren’s last year of life that she was able to see the program come to fruition, with two 12-week sessions attended by about 10 students each.

While Ogren was dying, Blanco and Ogren’s other daughter, Alida Anderson, assured their mother that they would be fine, and they promised her the Iowa Master Naturalists program would survive.

Ogren died in May 2016, passing hours after planning the master naturalists’ Memorial Day canoe trip.

“I told her I would make sure that it thrived, and that I would not let her legacy die,” Blanco said.

Nearly a decade later, Blanco and Anderson have kept their promise, and the Iowa Master Naturalists program is continuing to thrive, connecting Iowans with the natural world.

Anderson was one of the founding members of the program after Ogren’s death and said she was “honored to serve on the board of directors as vice president and eventual president.”

The sisters brought on an executive director to help with the program.

Elisabeth Swain has served as executive director of Iowa Master Naturalists for 10 years and has worked with dozens of Iowans who’ve completed the program.

Anderson said keeping the program going after her mother’s death would not have been possible without Swain and other volunteers.

“Without the efforts of the wonderfully dedicated group of volunteers who comprised the board at the time of Mom’s death, it would have been impossible to keep IMN afloat until we were able to recruit Elisabeth Swain to be the new executive director,” Anderson said. “I am so proud of what Mom accomplished in establishing this organization and indescribably happy to see how it has continued to grow and thrive in the years since her passing.”

Throughout her tenure with the program, Swain — who worked in the biochemistry department at the University of Iowa — said she has seen Iowans of all backgrounds and experience engage with the natural world.

Swain said the students’ knowledge and experience “runs the entire spectrum.”

“We’ve had city kids from New York City who were going to school in Iowa, who knew nothing. And then we have people who are former biology professors, so everything in between,” Swain said.

Swain said the program’s mission is to “educate a core of adult volunteers about Iowa’s environment and natural history.”

Through the 12-week class, Swain said the organization hopes to empower its students to promote awareness, appreciation and stewardship of the natural world in their own communities.

Each week, the directors bring in speakers and researchers from universities, the Iowa Department of Natural Resources and environmental nonprofits to teach the students about different topics relating to the outdoors.

For example, Swain said weeks have been dedicated to Iowa’s native birds, amphibians, reptiles, insects, aquatic invertebrates and beyond.

Students must pay a $250 entrance fee to the program — which totals about 40 hours of education — to help cover the cost of books and course materials.

Each session, Swain said, is led by a different expert who incorporates hands-on or outdoor learning into the session.

Aside from the 12 Saturday learning sessions, the students must complete 40 hours of volunteer work relating to environmental stewardship or working with citizen science groups.

Swain said this could be removing invasive species in local parks, engaging in species population surveys, leading nature walks or working with children outdoors.

The 40 hours of volunteer work goes toward the participant’s “capstone” project.

Swain said the students’ capstone projects have run the gamut.

In the past, she said one student published a book about outdoor spaces around Linn County. Another student project included making Native throwing sticks for Indian Creek Nature Center.

Anderson completed the Iowa Master Naturalists Program in 2016, immediately following her mother’s death.

She said the program was life changing for her.

“It altered the way that I see and interact with the world around me on a daily basis and formed the foundation of what has become my own passion for the conservation of Iowa’s natural history,” Anderson said.

Andy McCollum, a retired biology professor from Cornell College, said he learned about the Naturalists program while he was working with Habitat for Humanity.

He enrolled in the program because he thought it would “be a fun thing to do.”

“I didn’t really know much about it, but I went ahead and signed up,” McCollum said. “I figured I would enjoy the program and meet some like-minded people.”

Through his career teaching science, McCollum said he already knew about some of the topics taught in the class that had to do with biology, but said he enjoyed learning more about Iowa’s archaeology, a topic he didn’t know much about before the class.

Blanco, seeing the program into its tenth anniversary, said her mother would feel a “deep sense of peace and satisfaction” with its continued influence on Iowans.

One way Blanco feels the impact of the program is through her daughter’s education at Creekside Forest School, where her children have been taught by naturalists who completed the program.

“So even though my children never got to meet their grandma, they have learned from Master Naturalists who were trained by her program,” Blanco said. “Isn’t that beautiful?”

Olivia Cohen covers energy and environment for The Gazette and is a corps member with Report for America, a national service program that places journalists in local newsrooms to report on under-covered issues. She is also a contributing writer for the Ag and Water Desk, an independent journalism collaborative focusing on the Mississippi River Basin.

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Comments: olivia.cohen@thegazette.com