Urban Watershed Leadership

The Urban Watershed Leadership Program is designed to reflect the second priority mission statement:

RiverSides works with stakeholders to develop programs and educational products, and advance policy that preserves, protects and restores rivers.

The focus of the Urban Watershed Leadership program is to provide capacity building and knowledge enhancement for NGO leaders, municipal decision makers, developers and educators concerned with watershed protection and restoration by providing research, policy, education, & media exposure to the issues of low impact design, NPS pollution prevention, and social marketing.

The priority of this program is to provide research, education and support mechanisms that advance the LID knowledge and implementation capacity of communities across a spectrum of constituencies – NGOs, civic leaders, planners, landscape architects, developers, and individual watershed community activists.

Funding

UWL is supported by a combination of research grants, ongoing project work, and is seeking a naming sponsorship for its series of live and online LID seminars, Homeowners Guide to Rainfall web pages, and other NGO/municipal capacity building methods.

Plans are in place to develop a one major day LID seminar and six online webcast seminars exploring LID for the Canadian municipal and NGO decision makers. Growing the capacity of the green communities sector, and spreading LID through partnerships with NGOs and other constituencies is a priority of the UWL institute.

Communications

Maintaining the RiverSides H2infO list Serv is a priority for the growth of the UWL program. Other elements include the outreach on an issue by issue basis to municipal councillors challenging them to respond to RiverSides’ survey of their commitment to LID and watershed protection. This (municipal elections) outreach is proposed as a major means of growing profile for RiverSides while instilling LID as a policy and public issue with the public and media.

This is a good example of developing RiverSides as a known source for information to media in the GTA on issues of watershed protection and :”what you can do” aspects. The latter works well by focusing media on RiverSides and its work especially RSC.