Friends of Volo Bog Announces 2025 Scholarship Recipients

Caryn McAndrews
Jun 22
2 min read

The Friends of Volo Bog are excited to announce our 2025 Friends of Volo Bog Scholarship winners. We are grateful to all who applied, and we are so fortunate to be able to award five $2,000 scholarships this year. In addition to the three our organization funded, we received donations from Dave and Cynthia LeMieux and from the family of Dan Haller to allow for two additional awards.

Three of the winners are entering college. Abby Ashcraft of Barrington plans to attend the University of Denver to study environmental science. Abby is especially interested in doing field work and research related to climate change, and that school offers the Kenney Mountain Campus where she has a great opportunity to study and learn. Katherine Wondrasek of Hainesville will attend the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign to major in Natural Resources and Environmental Science, with a focus on botany. She has been involved with the Environmental Club at her high school, and in her future career would like to educate people on the importance of plants and the need to coexist with our ecosystems. Tej Kosaraju of Buffalo Grove will attend Stanford and plans to do earth science research. He has been very involved with hydrology research in high school, and as a result has learned specifics about the value of wetlands to our ecosystems.

The other two winners are continuing their studies. Jenna Duncan of Naperville will continue her studies at the University of Minnesota, with a special focus on insect conservation. She has been involved extensively with studying ecosystem contaminant threats, and wants to further address this in her future career. Gracie Benstine of Oswego will be starting a master’s program in Environment and Resources at the University of Wisconsin-Madison. She has completed a bachelor’s degree from Augustana College, where she was involved with environmental justice studies and wants to continue this research and help uphold indigenous stewardship.

We wish our five winners the best and are thankful that they want to work on behalf of our beautiful natural world.