KAMO September, 2020 Newsletter
For comments related to this document, contact Mike at brownmtjc@gmail.com

Hello Kids And Mentors Outdoors members and friends,
This is KAMO President Mark Walters with my monthly update. I have been spending about as many hours outdoors and on the go as a person literally can handle having been away from home 20 of the last 24 days and now preparing for another adventure.
For those of you that are not aware of this I have earned my living ever since 1989 as a syndicated outdoor adventures writer in the newspaper business. At the peek of my career which was in 2007, I wrote for 73 papers on a weekly basis. That is also the same year that I
started KAMO. From 1992 until 2007 I spent one to two days each month hitting the road and marketing An Outdoorsmans’s Journal.
When I started KAMO, without hesitation I gave my life over to KAMO and in all honesty did until Covid 19 hit in February of this year. The week that Covid hit I had 3 nights planned for KAMO events in different parts of the state and was happy to do it.
Since February Covid has eliminated four of the papers that I write for and I have held onto my career by selling advertising to put next to my column in many of my remaining papers. There is one chance that I have to make my career work until I can hopefully retire in about ten,years and that is to put my energy into marketing, marketing, marketing, kind of like I did until 2007.
The newspaper industry is in trouble but my ace is that I am content in a paper in a time when there is not a lot going on, and I have to project that in a marketing campaign that will add to my 56 so that I have some to lose.
The long story/short of what I am saying is that like 14 months ago when during our August BOD meeting it is time for someone else to pick up the reins and become KAMO’s second President I simply do not have the time to do this job in the way it needs to be done. I am asking that someone steps up to the plate by January 1st which will be a full 17-months after I first bought this issue up.
On another front, my phone went to heaven on Monday and I lost 370 contacts. Please email me at sunsetoutdoors@tds.net with your number!
I am looking at being an active member of KAMO and would be happy to work with our next President
Thank you so much for everything that you do for KAMO.
Mark

General – We have received a premium notice from our insurance company, SECURA, for the next year. The term runs from October 21st, 2020 until October 21st, 2021 and is for liability.
This invoice has been forwarded to Tom St. Clair,our treasurer, for payment.

Chapter Reports –

Baraboo – The Baraboo River Chapter held our September meeting on September 14th at Rivers Edge. Monthly One on One hours totaled 70 for our group. We have not held any of our traditional summer fishing events due to COVID, but did get kids out camping, hiking, canoeing and golfing.
I (Greg Wagner) did get 3 kids on a 3 day canoe trip at the end of July where we camped 2 nights on sandbars along the lower Wisconsin Riverway.
I also took out 2 kids for the youth duck hunt this past weekend (September 19th and 20th), but these hours will be reported at our October meeting. The weather was perfect and the boys shot 4 ducks total. One day we walked in and the other day we took my boat.
We are still planning on taking kids out duck hunting, but all Learn to Hunt programs have been canceled by the WI DNR for the remainder of 2020.

Coulee – Our mentor from Minnesota, Ed Gittens, is looking for another facility to lease that would be a setting for kids events and his outdoor art studio/ display area. Ed is a regional wildlife artist who often donates his outdoor art toward fundraising causes. One former kamokid, Roy, wants to be a mentor now, so added him to the mentor mailing list and will have him do a br check.
Weeds have been making their way down the main channel of the big river making fishing difficult there. The backwaters have been much cleaner and more fishable.
Elk can be viewed in good numbers east of the Black River State Forest in southern Jackson County. The Whitney, Neimitz, Arrow, and O roads loop contain some large fields they like to browse in. They move around a lot – they come and they go. Turkeys are out in extraordinary numbers.

Meadow Valley – We had 7 members attend at our September conference call meeting.
We reviewed the KAMO BOD guidance on mentoring which states only one on one mentoring could be done as a KAMO function.
We were pleasantly surprised to have been awarded a $1700 donation from the United Way foundation. This donation is from the local United Way organization that wanted their money going to a local organization involved with helping kids.
October pheasant LTH with the New Lisbon Sports Club has been cancelled.

Stay Safe

Northwoods – No activity to report this month.

Yellow River – Yellow River is pretty quiet, we will meet again October 19th. I do have a couple meetings set in the next two weeks with potential donors and folks that may help with our destination raffle for next year.
Brad
Mentor Recruitment Tool –
An online resource for finding new mentors has been The National Mentoring Partnership. They offer a feature called ?The Mentoring Connector? on their mentoring.org website. You can register your chapter on the site for free. For more information, use 617-303-4600 or info@mentoring.org After registering, what you hope happens next is that you hear from people. When you do, keep this in mind – get their phone number off ?inquiry history?, so you can call or text them. I discovered by chance that if you use the email back feature provided on the site, your message will often go into the person?s Spam folder. This is one of the few weaknesses of having a Gmail account, which is otherwise a fantastic resource.
One of our best mentors of all time learned of our group through the Mentoring Connector – and he?s still around.
Right now, if you do locate new people, they expect to hear that your chapter doesn?t have much going on, but they also know the pandemic won?t last forever.

Introduction to our Website –
Our website at kamokids.org was completely redesigned in 2018.
The desktop and mobile versions differ slightly. In the mobile version, a grid appears in the upper left hand corner. When you put your finger on that grid, the main pages appear. Using a laptop or mainframe, you?ll get the pages automatically included on the homepage.There are some differences in the page layout between the mobile and other versions,but the information is viewable either way.

Google Analytics – An administrator to the site can see a display of the traffic to the site. Currently, traffic is about 80 views a month – about one fourth the normal amount.
We can see which pages have been visited, length of stay by viewer, pages visited. Generally, our chapter and contact pages are popular and lately, viewers are taking interest in the newsletter.
There is an indication of how many attempts to hack into our site there has been and the IP address of the unit of the offender. These attempts are protected by a product known as Wordfence.

There is an advanced analytic that breaks things down even further- time of day and week viewers visit the site, type of device (mobile, laptop, mainframe), and more.

The information on our site is backed up on a server everyday so that if we experience problems, someone can retrieve and restore it.

The ?Additional Information? contains several pages nested within it.
?Enrollment forms? is intended to be a view and print feature for families or agencies who have kids they want to sign up under ?enrollment forms?.
A research page provides evidence pertaining to how important outdoor exposure is to human health, especially children.
Testimonials are quotes from parents, kids, agencies, mentors about their experiences in the group. There are some great ones there. Please feel free to submit any comments you hear and they can be added.
The ?Helpful Links? page has links that allow access to websites. There are websites for fish identification, general Wisconsin fishing info, camping tips, a section listing two sites from which you can customize and print a certificate for the novice who just bagged their first game, Mark?s column – Outdoorsmans Journal, Lake-link, and more.

If you have ideas or pictures to be added to the site, you can forward them to Mike or have your web person add them. We currently need a fall picture to put on the home page.