While this organization is new to California, V-O-Cal's approach to land stewardship is not a new concept. The founder and Executive Director of the organization, Cathy Moyer, has been an active and regular volunteer since 1987 with the organization that serves as a model for V-O-Cal, Volunteers for Outdoor Colorado.
Cathy is a relative newcomer to California, having moved to the Peninsula in 2004 from Colorado. After looking in vain for an organization that provides the kind of opportunity she had become accustomed to, working on large scale volunteer projects in a broad range of parks and open space areas, she decided to start one. Cathy spent most of the fall of 2005 doing "due diligence" on the concept of launching V-O-Cal to make sure she wasn't replicating something that already existed or trying to start something that simply wouldn't work here for some reason. After concluding not only that an opportunity existed, but that the timing was right given the needs of land managers in the area, V-O-Cal was born.
There are many differences between the V-O-Cal approach and the many organizations in the Bay area that perform some form of land stewardship. Mostly, those differences can be summed up in three categories: Scale, Planning, and Resource focus.