This is How to Make a Difference
Non-profit and volunteer organizations are key elements in our rehabilitation of this planet. There is no telling how many hours are put in on a daily basis towards research, education, and physical labor to help make this world a better place. Below are organizations that are ones that I have had great experiences with and enjoy their communities. What makes these organization even better is they do not run off of marketing on social media and tend to give non-biased and well researched information.
iNaturalist
iNaturalist is a phenomenal non-profit organization with a superb community. In a nutshell, it can help you locate, identify, and track flora and fauna anywhere in the world. This organization helps citizen scientists feed data to researchers and other organizations.
eBird
eBird is a fantastic organization that helps you locate birds, share your bird observations, and track your lists. It does so much more but that is up to you to explore.
Citizen Scientist.gov
This website has three primary parts, catalog, community and a toolkit. The catalog is a searchable database that allows you to locate citizen scientists and crowdsourcing projects. The community portion lets you find grassroots community groups. The toolkit aids you on a five step process of planning and conducting a citizen scientist project.
Fungal Diversity Survey (FUNDIS)
According to the FUNDIS website, it is the only non-profit organization that focuses on North American fugal biodiversity and conservation. They provide DNA sequencing, presentations, various projects you can aid, and plenty of other information on their database.
North American Mycology Association (NAMA)
NAMA is a nonprofit organization with a mixture of profession and amateur mycologists whose mission is to disseminate scientific and educational information related to fungi, advocates for sustainable fungi use and collection, and promote habitat protection. This is all done through conferences, regional forays, newsletters, journals, photo contests, educational programs, scholarships, toxicology, discussion groups, and a speakers burea.
NC State Extension Master Gardeners
This state ran program is comprised of volunteers (and state extension agents) that are trained and then used as educators to teach other citizens science-based information. Being a current member I can say they do so much more than that. Spreading knowledge, planting various species, helping diagnose plant problems, and giving advice is their specialty. They contribute a large amount of time all on volunteer hours.
Backyard Butterflies
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NC Moth Project
Backyard butterflies (and NC Moth Project which is a citizen scientist project by Backyard Butterflies) is a new-to-me organization that promotes butterfly and moths through education, community help, and assistance with supporting butterfly habitats. If a criteria is met, they will also donate keystone, host, and nectar plants. They have very fun and educational events you can attend as well like butterfly walks and “nothing” They are very active citizen scientists with professional backgrounds. Very excellent people to work with and they are local to the (general) Raleigh area.