November 2025 Newsletter
- Earth Discovery Institute
- 3 days ago
- 2 min read
Toad-ally Exciting Encounter
During one of our habitat restoration events this month, we spotted a native Western Spadefoot toad (a threatened species) and we were so excited! Whenever we have encounters like these, it is a perfect reminder of why all our hard work matters and why we are so grateful for our volunteer heroes who help us make an impact in San Diego's wild spaces. We have two more habitat restoration events at El Monte coming up before the end of 2025! If you'd like to give back to nature during the holiday season, we hope you'll join us. Details on our Events page!
So long to Simon!
This month, we bid a very bittersweet farewell to Simon Breen (back row center, khaki over shirt and glasses), EDI's Education Director for the past 3 1/2 years. Simon has contributed endless positivity and passion to EDI as a whole since joining the team and to say he will be missed is truly an understatement. The education team (both past EDI team members and present!) hosted a farewell gathering for Simon for all he's done for EDI's education programming during his reign here, and it was full of nothing but love, appreciation, laughs, and damp eyes! We love Simon and wish him the best of luck on his next chapter at the San Diego Zoo!
Rainy Restoration
Many hands make light work! While our first habitat restoration opportunity this month at El Monte was washed away due to the heavy rain, we had a wonderful group of volunteers brave the (lighter but still present) rain later in the month! Together, we installed an incredible 264 native sage scrub species into the ground, expanding and enhancing our cactus scrub restoration site for hopefully many more native visitors to come.
Happy 4 year workiversary to Ashley Mota!
Ashley Mota has grown from Administrative Assistant, Office Administrator, to Office Manager since joining the EDI team back in 2021. She is a strong believer of EDI's mission and vision: she finds our programming to be invaluable and believes keeping the organization going behind-the-scenes is her absolute dream job. If you've encountered her either by email, in social media interactions, or in person, she is the epitome of enthusiasm and will likely greet you with exclamation points (somehow even in person!). While she may wear a lot of hats around EDI, each one feels of equal importance to her and she is thrilled to be part of the EDI Dream Team. Happy 4 year work anniversary to Ashley!
Double Your Impact!
We are so excited to have launched Giving Tuesday early this last week with an incredible matching opportunity! A huge thank you to two EDI board members who pledged to match $11,000 in donations now through Giving Tuesday (December 2nd). We would be so grateful if you could help us spread the word and/or help us unlock these funds and create stability for the future of our environmental education programming! To donate, you can visit our MightyCause page, or donate through our website and we can manually add the donations to our MightyCause page. Thank you as always for being part of our community and making our programming possible!