Hi DSST! My name is Abbie Bardales and I am the 2019 Core Value winner for Responsibility. The charity that I'm choosing to support for this year's Giving & Cheer celebration is Volunteers for Outdoor Colorado (VOC).

VOC is Colorado's oldest outdoor stewardship nonprofit organization. VOC volunteers work to maintain Colorado's spectacular outdoors through trail maintenance, habitat restoration, urban gardening, flood and fire mitigation and restoration, and park improvements and maintenance.

As someone who has lived in Colorado my entire life, the Colorado outdoors are extremely important to me. The population growth in Colorado in the last 20 years alone has been huge and it has put a strain on many of the outdoor areas that Coloradans know and love.

VOC seeks to ensure that our outdoors will remain healthy and accessible for people to enjoy for many years to come. VOC's work embodies the core value of Responsibility because we all have a responsibility to ensure we leave our natural spaces the way we found them. Being responsible means considering how your actions impact others, and VOC seeks to ensure that we take ownership of our actions and impact on natural spaces now so that they can still be enjoyed many years in the future.

I'm so excited for DSST to support VOC's conservation work so that all of our students and future students will have the chance to enjoy the outdoors for years to come!

DSST will be donating $1,000 to Volunteers for Outdoor Colorado. For more on Responsibility, check out this video where former Responsibility winners share what this Core Value means to them!