Jane Rau, Volunteer of Excellence

From Friends of the Scenic Drive

At Cookout at the Ranch IX, Friends of the Scenic Drive named Jane Rau as its Volunteer of Excellence for 2004-2005. It is a well-deserved award and a small token in return for Jane’s decades of community service.

Saguaros cannot speak, so Jane Rau spoke for them. Read the minutes of the Scottsdale City Council any time there was a preservation issue on the agenda, and you will find the name of Jane Rau as an advocate for the desert.

Walk, drive, or cycle through the north Scottsdale desert with the sunrise, and you are liable to meet Jane riding her 44-year-old Schwinn bicycle. "Life is full of surprises, and most people don’t notice," Jane says of the sights, sounds, and critters that accompany her early morning rides.

If you have spent any time around Jane, you notice. You have no choice. She serves as an educator and desert proponent for both residents and elected officials.

When Jane left Ohio in 1962 and arrived here, most roads in north Scottsdale were dirt. She built her hogan in the desert before her land was annexed by Scottsdale in the 1980s. That’s when she became an advocate for desert preservation, serving on several preservation task forces.

She helped create the McDowell Sonoran Land Trust (MSLT), from which all of us in Scottsdale, Phoenix and our visitors benefit. "I never dreamed it would get that big," she says. Jane sits on the McDowell Sonoran Preserve Commission.

She was recently inducted into the Scottsdale History Hall of Fame, partially for helping to raise the consciousness of residents to preserve the McDowells.

Jane preaches the value of partnerships, whether speaking before the council, or at board meetings of organizations like the Game and Fish, Friends of the Scenic Drive, or the Greater Pinnacle Peak Association.

But Jane does much more than talk. She is a worker. At the regularly scheduled trash pickups on the Foothills Scenic Drive, she is the first one out picking up litter and often the last one in. When the unique desert plant exhibits on the Scenic Drive required restoration, Jane was there. She has worked at the annual fundraiser for the Friends of the Scenic Drive, the Cookout at the Ranch, since its inception.

Jane has been a long time attendee at the National Land Trust Alliance National Rally, driving her own camper, and paying her own expenses to bring back information for the city as well as the MSLT. She is past president of the Greater Pinnacle Peak Association.

From her land in north Scottsdale, and with the proper legalities necessary to move a protected plant completed, Jane donated a saguaro to the Desert Foothills Scenic Drive exhibit to honor the memory of Don Schoenau. Jane helped formulate Scottsdale’s Scenic Corridor Guidelines.

Jane is amazing. The only compromise by Jane we have ever witnessed was at a city council meeting in 2003. Jane requested that she be the first member of the public to speak. "I’m 81, and I worked outside all day."

Jane challenges each of us to "walk the land to see what you are destroying," to be good stewards of the land. Thank you, Jane. Our Scottsdale would have been a very different and much less beautiful place without you.

Web: www.scenicdrive.org