Building the Watershed Movement

Whether it's ending segregation, changing smoking habits, or protecting our environment, successfully changing the world requires the strategic and patient investment of time, energy and money in building and networking successful organizations over not just years, but decades.

Indeed, recent studies have confirmed that the positive effects of local watershed protection groups increase exponentially after their first few years of existence.

Effective watershed groups invest most of their first few years in essential foundation-building work, including documenting watershed conditions and trends, deciding what problems or threats deserve most of their early attention, involving the people who are absolutely critical to their success, building public understanding and support, establishing the kind of organization necessary for the tasks at hand, defining their first few projects, and obtaining the funding they need.

Only when these things are done, and done well, are groups ready to begin in earnest the business of protecting and restoring their watersheds. Doing them all well takes time - on average, studies show, about five years.

Even then, no one organization can change the world on its own. Bringing organizations together to share their successes and learn from their failures is a powerful and essential means of leveraging additional change.

Since our founding in 1988, River Network has spawned and united an entire network of organizations focused on protecting our “home waters” and their watersheds. In our first decade, we grew the number of River Network Partners to 220. Today, that number has increased to nearly 700.

Our Partnership Program provides general resources and services via two quarterly print newsletters (River Voices and River Fundraising Alert) and via our newly updated password-protected Partner-only website, which includes a library of templates and examples related to organizational development (i.e., personnel policies; bylaws; job descriptions; employee evaluations, etc.), pre-packaged information toolkits, access to a Partner listserv where questions can be answered by peers, and more.

Our Organizational Development Program provides “one to many” training at workshops and conferences, as well as more targeted “one to one” assistance to help watershed groups address more specific concerns, such as board development, strategic planning, funding diversity and other organizational needs.

We hope you will join us as we build the watershed movement into an even stronger network of state and local organizations with a common interest in protecting and restoring our most precious natural resource -- water.