HARRISBURG — Women are Pennsylvania's fastest growing group of hunters and a new partnership between the Game Commission and the National Wild Turkey Federation will help provide more outdoors opportunities to women in the state.

With funding from the Game Commission, the turkey group hired Jeff Souders of Harrisburg to serve as a full-time women in the outdoors coordinator. Pennsylvania is the only state with such coordinator, according to a news release from the PGC.

In his position, Souders will create outdoors events for women, re-energize chapters of the turkey organization and reach out to women who have never participated in the program.

Julie Imes of Elliottsburg, Perry County, also was hired as the recruitment and retention coordinator.

In this capacity, Imes is the coordinator for the National Archery in the Schools program, which encourages youth who enjoy target archery shooting to consider the transition into 3-D target archery shooting and then to hunting.