The Learning Center at the Euchee Butterfly Farm Inc

f’as@^, Jane Breckinridge A zAtE.  Yudjeha kAdU^ dandA gapA.

Hello, my name is Jane Breckinridge. I am Yuchi and Muscogee Creek.

It began with a simple idea – that we could help save the monarch by creating a migration trail on tribal lands through Oklahoma.  Seven years and 70,000 milkweed plants later, dozens of tribes have committed hundreds of acres to providing land and resources needed to sustain the monarchs. Our journey to becoming a successful organization is much like the journey that monarchs take – seemingly improbable with little chance of success when viewed from an outside perspective but driven by unshakable sense of purpose internally.  

Our mission is to help improve the lives of Native people, plants and pollinators.  We achieve this through innovative community-based programs that emphasize capacity building, cultural preservation, and sustainability.  The central element that runs through our work is the power of butterflies, particularly monarch butterflies -- they inspire conservation action, facilitate youth science education and promote understanding between cultures. Wingbeats changing the world.

Currently, the demand for our programming is much higher than our capacity to deliver it.  With your support, we could change that and leverage our work to date exponentially. 

The Learning Center at the Euchee Butterfly Farm is a 501(c)3 nonprofit organization.  Our headquarters are located on the Muscogee (Creek) Nation Reservation at the Euchee Butterfly Farm, just outside of Tulsa, Oklahoma. 

We are a boots-on-the-ground organization and our staff members are part of the communities that we serve. This gives us unique insight into the needs of our constituencies and what the obstacles are to our achieving mission goals, plus accords us a more accurate ability to assess if our programs are working successfully and efficiently.  Our connection to the communities that we serve also allows us to create genuine stakeholder buy-in as we try to effect change.

The challenged communities and degraded habitats on tribal lands in rural Oklahoma are our primary service area.  Their needs have frequently been neglected by nonprofit organizations, governmental agencies, and sometimes even tribal governments.  We have been focused on these forgotten communities and habitats since 2013, with a demonstrated track record of improving the lives of Native people, plants and pollinators by harnessing the power of the monarch butterfly to inspire, uplift and educate.  

The Euchee Butterfly Farm assists us by providing free space for offices, events and seed bank.  

Our mission is to help improve the lives of Native people, plants and pollinators.  We achieve this through innovative community-based programs that emphasize capacity building, cultural preservation, and sustainability.  The central element that runs through all of our work is the power of butterflies, particularly monarch butterflies -- they inspire conservation action, facilitate youth science education and promote understanding between cultures. Wingbeats changing the world. 

 Our flagship program is the Natives Raising Natives Project.  Its three primary goals are:

Create economic development for Native Americans through butterfly farming by providing technical training, no-cost supplies and guaranteed market access.

• Provide a hands-on learning opportunity that teaches Native American youth about science, agriculture and conservation.

• Raise awareness about the need for habitat conservation efforts that support native butterflies and other threatened pollinators.

We are also the founders of three other initiatives: Tribal Alliance Pollinators (TAP), which is the only Native-led organization working on grassland restoration; Tribal Environmental Action for Monarchs (TEAM), which was the first inter-tribal monarch conservation program in the world; and Food Initiative for Tribes (FIT), which is the only nonprofit addressing food deserts across tribal boundaries in Oklahoma.    

Our programs are based on principles of data-based decision making, but also rely heavily on Traditional Ecological Knowledge of our Elders and tribal cultural advisors to guide our decision-making processes.  Although our staff members are Native American, we actively engage with all communities that share the goals of our mission.  We provide a nexus for governmental agencies, universities, NGOs and foundations to understand and support the conservation, agricultural and sustainable economic development efforts of Indigenous people. 

Natives Raising Natives is the first and only program in the United States to teach butterfly farming to tribal members.  It provides a unique opportunity to create sustainable, environmentally friendly economic development in rural areas lacking traditional employment opportunities. 

Tribal Alliance for Pollinators (TAP) is the only Native-led organization working to restore grasslands. TAP unites traditional ecological knowledge with cutting edge technical resources to create an innovative model for conservation and restoration of tribal lands. We provide hands-on training and technical support for tribes that want to help threatened pollinators and to preserve the native plants that serve as the foundation for Indigenous cultural, medicinal and culinary traditions.   Additionally, TAP has a seed bank and a lending library of equipment for native plant restoration.

Native Americans struggle financially in rural Oklahoma, where land is often of very poor quality for traditional farming and non-agricultural jobs are scarce.  Butterfly farming is an exploding agricultural opportunity that is uniquely suited to these challenges.  Unlike traditional farming, butterfly farming utilizes native species of plants and trees as a food source for the livestock, does not require large quantities of water or acreage, has minimal start-up costs, can be done on a part-time basis to supplement existing income sources, and does not require the high level of physical strength that traditional farming does.  Our program participants include the elderly, physically-handicapped, single-parents, youths with no prior work experience and veterans. 

For our conservation initiatives, no other non-governmental or community organization currently exists to provide support or technical resources for monarch/pollinator habitat restoration on tribal land. Tribal nations are unique communities that need specialized outreach and education efforts, and for historical and cultural reasons these efforts are unlikely to succeed unless designed by and for Native people. Additionally, the prevalence of diet related disease and food deserts in Native communities demonstrates the urgent need for improving the productivity of agricultural land through improved pollinator support.