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Meet Nicole Corey

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Today we’d like to introduce you to Nicole Corey.

Nicole, let’s start with your story. We’d love to hear how you got started and how the journey has been so far.
My husband, Justin and I come from outdoor-oriented families and we were both taught at a young age to pick up after ourselves and to pick up after others if we came across trash in the outdoors. Justin and I attended a few annual cleanup events but we kept hearing talk of land closures if the areas didn’t stay clean and we wondered about what was being done the other 364 days a year to combat this problem on public land?

We do not believe land closure is the solution because it just spreads the problem. Further, it does nothing to address the actual issue of irresponsible recreation. Justin and I were motivated to start an organization that did not see the closure as the answer. We set out to get community members, with a heavy focus on youth volunteers, to come out and participate in stewardship events to learn why access to our public lands is so important, how to practice Leave No Trace Ethics, and that when we come together as a community with a common goal, we can make an immediate, visible impact on the earth. To date, we have hosted 62 volunteer events and we have engaged over 6,500 volunteers.

While we were figuring out how to launch Natural Restorations, Justin’s best friend from high school, Derek, had returned after several tours in the Middle East and had come back with PTSD and traumatic brain injury. During a camping trip with Derek, they talked about their goals for the future. Justin told Derek about his plans for Natural Restorations and Derek spoke of nothing other than getting back to the war in the Middle East. The next day, they started picking up trash from target shooting and after a few minutes, Derek asked Justin if this was what he had in mind for Natural Restorations and if so, he wanted in. He found a sense of peace being in nature and focused on the task at hand. Nothing complicated, just picking up anything that wasn’t natural and leaving the area restored to what nature had intended.

In an instant, Justin knew that in addition to hosting volunteer events, we have a duty to create a program for Military Veterans that would enrich their lives and provide them with more than just a paycheck. Our Dedicated Restoration Team tackles projects above and beyond what we can ask of most volunteers. There is more to our Dedicated Restoration Team than trash and graffiti removal. Veterans working with us benefit from our program not only through paid contract work but also through spending time in nature with other veterans. It is extremely rewarding both mentally and physically for veterans in our program to accomplish each restoration we undertake and make lasting impacts on the state. We offer a community where individuals with similar experiences can engage with one another, building lifelong relationships, all while decompressing in the great outdoors.

Sadly, Derek passed away one year to the day we officially launched Natural Restorations with the Arizona Trail Association as our fiscal sponsor for our first 32 months of operation. Everything we do is in Derek’s honor and even though we never got the opportunity to bring him onto our team, we honor him every time we bring Veterans out with us on a project. It’s especially touching and rewarding when Veterans on our team take the time to express what working with us means to them and their families. To date, we have completed 41 week-long projects with our team and provided 4,827 hours of contract work to Veterans. They are making lasting impacts on the state and each other with each restoration we complete.

We celebrated our 5th anniversary of Natural Restorations in March, but we will officially celebrate this milestone on Earth Day 2020. We are still waiting on a few dumpster weights to come in, but at the time of this interview, we have removed more than 489 tons of trash, that’s 978,000 pounds! We will be hitting the million-pound mark soon! We have also removed 32,520 square feet of graffiti from rocks and boulders. Justin and I work on every single project together; we plan and host the volunteer events and work side by side with the Veterans on our team on every project.

We are thrilled to announce that this summer/fall, we will be expanding our program with our Dedicated Restoration Team to include reforestation projects in addition to trash and graffiti removal.

We’re always bombarded by how great it is to pursue your passion, etc – but we’ve spoken with enough people to know that it’s not always easy. Overall, would you say things have been easy for you?
I don’t think anyone who has started a business, let alone a non-profit from the ground up, has had a smooth road. There have been a lot of struggles and challenges along the way, but we have never wavered once in commitment to our mission, we find the positive in every situation, and we keep moving forward. One of the biggest struggles for us initially is that we had no way to launch and fund our Dedicated Restoration Team and bring Military Veterans onto our team. I’m certain most people thought we would fail within the first year or two given the statistics of other non-profits. We decided quickly that we needed to start with volunteer events for the community and the team would come eventually. We started hosting volunteer events and across the state and applying for grants.

In 2017, we received a grant from the OHV-fund managed by Arizona State Parks & Trails and through that grant, we were able to launch our Dedicated Restoration Team and launch our graffiti removal program. In September 2017, we received our own 501(c)(3) non-profit designation from the IRS and in November 2017, we moved away from fiscal sponsorship with the Arizona Trail Association. Unfortunately, during this time, we were unable to secure funding for our team in 2018 and that was a big struggle for us to take a step back, but we knew that wouldn’t be the end of our team and it wasn’t.

We’ve had so many struggles and challenges over the last five years that I could write pages, but they have all helped us get to where we are today and I wouldn’t change any of it.

Please tell us about the organization.
Our mission is to remove the trash, graffiti, and anything foreign to the environment from outdoor recreation and wilderness areas while enriching the lives of Military Veterans and other community members. We accomplish our mission by hosting volunteer events across the state to engage youth volunteers and community members in stewardship actives. We don’t go into classrooms and put kids to sleep showing them pictures of trash, we get them outdoors and provide them an opportunity to work together with people they may not know to make a positive impact on the environment. They get to see the wildlife they are helping and they start to build a connection with nature that will stay with them into adulthood. We love hearing from parents who tell us their kids did not want to come to our volunteer event because picking up trash sounded lame. Then they get to the event and they explore the area, they find wildlife and they start to make a connection to the importance of not leaving trash in nature. We are known for our dedication and non-stop work across the state to remove trash and graffiti to help keep public lands open for everyone to enjoy.

We are most proud of the work we are doing with Veterans. We love that we have almost removed a million pounds of trash and we’re thrilled we have removed over 32,500 square feet of graffiti, but it’s the impact we have made on the veterans on our team and their families that we are most proud of. There isn’t a day that goes by that we don’t ache for the chance to have Justin’s best friend, Derek on our team. Still, when we stop to look at our team and hear them laughing and joking around while we’re picking up thousands of pieces of irrigation tubing someone dumped along the trail, we know that Derek is smiling down on us and is proud of what we are doing to help the Veteran community.

I don’t know of any other organization out there like ours because of what we have created with our Veteran-based Dedicated Restoration Team. We aren’t selling a product or anything like that, we have a calling to keep Arizona beautiful, help create life-long stewards of our lands, educate the public on responsible recreation and how fun it can be, and to give back to the Veteran community in any way we can. I think what sets us apart from others is why we are on this parth. We are on this path to give back and restore people and places with no other motives and I think people can see that and they feel it at our events.

So, what’s next? Any big plans?
Our plans for the future include expanding our Dedicated Restoration Team. We started with a small group of five, including myself, Justin, and 3 Veterans. At the time, that’s all we could fit in our vehicle, so that’s how we came up with the number. We are also expanding our mission to include Reforestation projects. We are going to start working on a project on a fire-scar near Flagstaff this summer and we will be working on restoring the areas devastated by the Wallow Fire this fall provided we can fund the projects. I think the most significant change coming for us is expanding to other states. That has always been a goal of ours since we started, but Arizona has kept us busy.

Contact Info:

Image Credit:
Personal photo of Nicole Corey – courtesy of Robert Coonrod
Justin & Nicole Corey – photo courtesy of Tru Flask & O’Shea Tometi
NPLD Event 9.29.19 – photo courtesy of Tom Story

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