ODYSSEY ANGELS

2023-2024 Odyssey Angels 

Team Awesomesauce from Virginia 

  OM is proud to announce this year’s Odyssey Angels winners— Team Awesomesauce from Virginia! The team used re-purposed materials to help the nesting population in their community — and they got their neighbors and fellow students involved as well! Because of their creativity, teamwork skills, and community organizing the team successfully collected materials, found a new use for them that helped the environment AND animals in their area. Because of their work birds and other nesting animals had the materials they needed to create safe homes and helped rebuild the population in their area. The team wanted to complete this project as a
celebration of so many years as a team, being outgoing OM seniors.
    “As High School Seniors, we knew it would be our last year doing odyssey together and we wanted to honor our nine years as a team by giving back and doing an Odyssey Angels project. We wanted to do something to help out the environment and we read about the decline in bird population, particularly in suburban areas like where we are located. From there, we brainstormed ideas and came up with the idea for nesting materials,” the team said.
​    During the fall, they gathered nesting materials from local landscapers and contacted nearby llama farms about gathering their fall cuttings. They also reached out to other businesses to get leftovers for the nests - such as a local Halloween attraction that had leftover hay bales and a company that uses coconut husks for gardening. No one has re-purposing skills like OMers!
    The Angels also worked with a local community college for the assembly and distribution of the Angel nests.
    The team spent two weeks cutting, sorting and bagging the components needed. During the event at the college, they had over 40 college student volunteers and they made over 120 “Angel Nests”. We explained how we made our example ones, but encouraged everyone to be creative with how they did it!
    While everyone was making their unique Angel Nests, the team members explained how these were important for the birds by not only supplying them with easier materials for better nest building to help grow the locally dwindling bird population, but also because it prevents birds from using toxic materials in their nests which can harm baby birds.
    Thanks to the Angels unique take on an environmental issue, local bird populations are sure to grow!

Odyssey Angels Project - Angel Nests (youtube.com)