Friends of Lake Elmo's Sunfish Lake Park

Since we opened our doors in 2018, the Sally Manzara Interpretive Nature Center has been welcoming and educating nature lovers from around Washington County, the East Metro, and beyond. Located at the southeast corner of Sunfish Lake Park in Lake Elmo, MN, we try to offer our visitors a place of peace, where people from all backgrounds are welcome and where everyone can learn and find something of interest. Our indoor and outdoor exhibits were lovingly crafted and curated and are the result of hundreds of volunteer hours, and our events and programs are carefully developed and selected to appeal to a range of visitors, from pre-K to adult, on topics ranging from at-home conservation, to Minnesota wolf populations, to dragonfly identification, to utilizing technology for enhancing our understanding of the natural world, to stargazing—and everything in between.

In 2023, the Sally Manzara Interpretive Nature Center welcomed more than 5,000 guests. Our annual events, like the John Neitge Earth Day Celebration, Family Nature Day and the Buckthorn Removal Festival, bring hundreds of nature lovers to Washington County each year. During that same time, we also logged over 4,000 volunteer hours, which represents the dedication of our neighbors who come in to greet visitors at reception, maintain our gardens, clear our walks, and keep up and update our exhibits. In addition to our regular volunteers the Sally Manzara Interpretive Nature Center often welcomes scout troops, church groups and other organizations for their service projects, and in this way we have become a place where all different members of the community can come together to build something better.

Since our founding, the Sally Manzara Interpretive Nature Center’s mission has been grounded in five basic principles: stand as a symbol of the stewardship of our community for its natural surroundings and heritage; serve as a focus of community activities related to outdoor life; provide a place where people of all ages can learn about the unique natural history and ongoing ecology of Sunfish Lake Park; teach environmental awareness via specific local examples; and honor the agricultural heritage of Lake Elmo. In many ways these five principles can be boiled down to two core values: environmental education, and local impact. We see providing knowledge and education to the community as vital to the betterment of our community. Sometimes those educational opportunities come in the form of lectures and workshops, through our adult education series, sometimes they come in the form of youth focused programs designed to get children out in and learning about nature, and sometimes they come in the form of our volunteer efforts to, for example, control invasive plant species in Sunfish Lake Park.

Please visit our website www.sminc-lake-elmo.org for further information