River Rally 2012 - All Workshop Sessions

Discover how to work in coalitions and networks more effectively! This workshop provides tools and processes for successfully starting and sustaining multi-organization advocacy efforts. Explore different models for organizing networks and coalitions and when to use each. Identify and address persistent tensions.

Have you read your own 990? Come learn what to look for in a 990 and hear about common errors and misconceptions. The 990 has become just as important for funder relations as public relations.

Are you tired of aimless meetings that don't generate energy, commitment, or clear next steps? Learn how to make your meetings more productive, inclusive, and fun. In this workshop, you'll learn: why meetings fail; the key to effective meetings: make decisions; building a great agenda; Robert's Rules vs. consensus and how to fix a broken meeting.

Wild and Scenic River recommendations made by public lands agencies tend to be contentious among environmental interests and water users and providers. This workshop will take an in-depth look at the events, interim-outcomes and lessons-learned of the consensus based, collaborative River Protection Workgroups currently taking place in southwest Colorado.

The Mission Reach Project is restoring an eight mile stretch of the San Antonio River into a quality riverine and riparian woodland ecosystem by enhancing aquatic habitat, reintroducing native plants, reconnecting cultural and historical features and adding recreational amenities. Learn how the San Antonio River Authority is accomplishing this transformation.

Watershed monitoring is way to engage the local community while providing your organization with useful information. A well designed program can provide the data needed to help determine the best ways to protect and restore your watershed. This workshop is designed for those beginning volunteer monitoring program.

The success of an organization starts with the Board of Directors. While some groups look at how to recruit board members, they fall short of an organized and targeted approach to building strength on the Board. Board development establishes a systematic approach to adding people, and follows up with specific steps to keep current board members active and excited.

You can resolve conflict in the office, the board room and the community through love and compassion using the teachings of Martin Luther King, Jr. and Mohandas Gandhi. This session will focus on practicing this positive approach after a short introduction to nonviolent principles and soul force.

Overwhelmed or discouraged by what is happening on to our planet, what actions to take or how you feel? Is it hard to feel like you are making progress? Explore what science says about our changing planet and bodies and discover your path of possibilities and tools to navigate our changing world and be the change we envision.

Unused, unwanted, and unsecured drugs are polluting our water, poisoning our kids and promoting crime in our communities. Learn how the NC Riverkeepers have built a coalition of environmental, public health and safety, substance abuse prevention and law enforcement agencies to coordinate and support local and statewide drug take-backs, organize stakeholder meetings and develop both a cohesive public message and proposed legislative and regulatory changes.

Interested in learning what information and data supports an action? What steps you should consider taking before beginning an enforcement action? What needs to be in a 60-day notice letter? What happens afterward? Join us as we review the basics of filing the 6-day notice. Lots of examples will be provided and the purpose of the panel is to empower advocates to act to enforce the Clean Water Act.

Welcome to Oregon! This panel will introduce people to the rivers of Oregon, with attention to their beauty, biology, protection measures, and significance to conservation efforts elsewhere. The photos and discussion will inspire, inform, and enliven us all with the vitality of the streams and their stewards in the home state of River Rally 2012.

The data is in: organizations that have written fundraising plans have larger budgets and more staff, volunteers and donors than those that don't. This workshop will help staff and Board members put fundraising goals into action. We'll cover the basics of fundraising planning and share a simple-to-use template to develop a plan that includes the funding strategies most feasible for your organization.

The workshop will focus on the principles and methods developed and used at Charles River Watershed Association over the last 20 years to enforce the Clean Water Act, change policy and regulation, and move dramatically closer to a fully restored Charles River.

While many volunteer water monitoring programs operate at state or regional scales, most events are run at a local watershed scale. Missouri Stream Team volunteers in Saint Louis have developed techniques and events to make water monitoring projects educational, informative, and fun for diverse volunteers. Learn to do the same!

Larger river systems pose many challenges to effective restoration strategies. Restoring vegetation, natural hydrology or historic water quality is far more complicated and results are harder to measure than in smaller tributaries. This session will allow three champions of large system river restoration to speak to their strategies and experience.

SYRCL's Wild & Scenic Film Festival offers a wonderful way to educate, entertain, and motivate audiences in your town. Come learn how Wild and Scenic On Tour can help raise funds, gain exposure for an environmental campaign and create a new educational and inspiring event for your community.

Protective designations - from Wild & Scenic to Outstanding Resource Waters to state designations - are hard to achieve, but provide long-term protection for special places. Learn from advocates who ran successful designation campaigns and join a discussion about if, why, and how the different designations are right for your river.

Phosphorus and nitrogen pollution is drastically affecting waters all over the country. This session will provide an overview of the national problem of nutrient pollution followed by a discussion of the effort to develop numeric nutrient criteria. As an example, we'll discuss Wisconsin, which passed a phosphorus rule in 2010.

Come learn how the Clean Water Act and other, existing water protection laws allow ongoing environmental and spiritual/cultural harm, and learn about specific, Earth-based governance alternatives. Discussion of such issues is particularly timely given the 40th anniversary of the Clean Water Act, which prompts deep reflection on our next steps as waterway advocates.

Learn the fundamentals of discharge permits under the Clean Water Act. We will examine actual permits and permittee self-reporting documents. We will also do a hands-on exercise to better understand permits and find violations.

Communicating water quality data effectively is an often overlooked aspect of water quality monitoring programs. Come learn about the methods developed by San Diego Coastkeeper and Santa Monica Baykeeper, allowing users with differing knowledge bases and interests to use the same data portal. As users dive into a web display, they are presented with data in order of most digested to most technical.

Learn how to use Crowdsourcing to Protect Your Waterway. We will provide step-by-step instructions on creating your own interactive collaborative water pollution map using Crowdmap. Xin Hao, Qiantang River Waterkeeper, has created the first interactive crowdsourcing water pollution map in China for which he won the UNEP Eco-Peace Leadership Program Award in 2011.

Invasive species disrupt ecosystems and recreation in our waterways; we'll share stories about identifying invasives in your waterways, conducting effective outreach and messaging to spread awareness and learning lessons on interacting with county and state agencies to strengthen regulations to protect waterways from invasive encroachment. Join us for a thrilling discussion and leave armed with the knowledge to properly fight the battle of encroaching invasives in your waterway.

This workshop will explore the leadership staffing options within a Waterkeeper organization; whether to have the Executive Director and Waterkeeper wrapped into one position or split the duties between two persons.

Strategic planning isn't an old hat and it isn't a relic of management that is no longer relevant. It's a vital investment that every groups needs to make, and a process that must fit the culture and critical issues for that particular group.

In the wake of the BP Oil Disaster, we have a responsibility and an opportunity to focus on meaningful restoration along the Gulf Coast. The environmental community also has an opportunity to prove environmental restoration is the key to long-term economic recovery. Forming partnerships with unlikely allies can begin to kill the fallacy of Jobs versus the Environment or that EPA and the Clean Water Act are destroying our economy. We can and we must take back the environment for the sake of our economy.

The use, value and differences between biomonitoring, bioassessement and biocriteria will be presented. We'll focus on how to access bioassessement information and how it can be used for protection and restoration. You'll leave understanding how bioassessements complement traditional chemical monitoring, how they connect to economic and public health issues, and more. Diverse case studies will illustrate the use of bioassessements locally and in Clean Water Act programs.

The Huron River Watershed Council has launched a 3-year project to develop and disseminate a home "Saving Water Saves Energy" campaign and toolkit for distribution to households in Southeast Michigan as well as watershed organizations across the country. We'll share what we've learned so far and discuss partnership opportunities.

While nationally and in many states, agency familiarity with environmental justice issues is growing, understanding how to integrate environmental justice into decision-making remains stagnant. Participants in this workshop will explore examples of successful communication of environmental justice issues to federal, state, and local governments. We will focus on communicating the importance and need to act on environmental justice to decision makers.

The Clean Water Act is turning 40 - and it faces the most severe congressional attacks in its history. This workshop examines the history and success of the Act, looming congressional threats and what we all can do to protect it. Anyone with a stake in the future of the Act should attend.

This advanced workshop gives participants an overview of how to develop a residential LID rainharvesting program, focused on achieving significant lot level stormwater capture. We wukk focus on residential rainharvesting campaign design, rainharvesting social marketing, BMP selection and performance, how to troubleshoot property owner engagement, and long term planning.

Leadership transitions occur for any number of reasons, planned and unplanned. Executive transitions are transformational. Poorly managed, they often bring on a crisis, leading to decreased effectiveness and sometimes organizational failure. This session will prepare executive directors and board members to lead their organizations through a process of planning for leadership transitions.

Are you trying to increase membership, reach a more diverse audience, or attract new donors? Do you want to move beyond the brainstorming sessions of new ideas? This workshop helps participants apply a solid, systematic, marketing approach to fundraising, volunteer recruitment, membership, program participation and even board recruitment.

The Coca-Cola Company is partnering with conservation NGOs to implement protection and restoration projects to support healthy watersheds. Case studies will highlight development of community water partnerships and efforts to quantify water quality and quantity benefits. Bonneville Environmental Foundation will discuss development of Water Restoration Credits for such projects.

In today's fiscal climate it is more important than ever to demonstrate the socio-economic value of conservation work. This workshop will introduce recent efforts to quantify job creation and economic output resulting from watershed restoration investments, and a new tool for practitioners to estimate restoration's economic value to their region.

This session will cover the science of Marcellus Shale as well as the role volunteer monitors can play in assessing impacts related to shale natural gas extraction. Participants will receive hands-on training on suggested monitoring techniques (visual, chemical, water quantity).

Trash is a common and visible pollutant in all urban waterways and continues to be a threat in downstream areas, including our world ocean. Participate in a discussion about programs for debris removal, data collection at cleanups, and advocacy efforts for reduction of common types of debris including single-use plastics.

This is an introduction to the federal anti-degradation rule and its purpose as a water quality standard. The workshop will focus on the federal rule and its adoption by the states. Additionally, the workshop will include a case study of how the anti-degradation rule has been applied in practice.

Proof That Porous Pavement Can Succeed in a Midwestern Climate! In an exciting and highly applicable format for nonprofits, local governments, federal agencies and consultants, the presentation will document the process of procuring and selecting the site; reveal the funding sources and communication behind project development; demonstrate the design and field modification of monitoring equipment; step through the monitoring process and discuss the findings; explain the significance of these results for reducing water quantity, improving water quality, and reducing carbon emissions; and provide lesson learned

Spring runoff flows are crucial for maintaining healthy rivers and dynamic channel habitat, but are often missing from dammed rivers. These flows can be restored on rivers with an "on/off" switch. Come learn about why spring runoff is important and how to bring this concept to a river near you!" Attendees are encouraged to bring a laptop for a hands on demonstration.

This workshop will discuss local water challenges through a brief survey and an interactive idea mapping exercise. We will then link these issues to federal policy gaps, including exemptions to Safe Drinking Water Act requirements fand gaps in the Clean Water Act. Finally, the group will brainstorm to craft policy recommendations to concretely address these issues. The results of the workshop will inform the Pacific Institute's current focus on reforming federal water policy for the 21st century.

Times are tough all over. With cuts at all levels of government, how are pots of funding for restoration faring? Do some types of funds weather hard times better than others? Learn which types of state and federal funding strategies might still have the ommphff to keep your restoration rolling.

In-stream flow is critical to the health of rivers. Yet, flow problems are often ignored because remedies are unclear. Learn how activists, scientists and policy experts are approaching flows in Western rivers. Contribute your own stories and solutions to an in-stream flow platform that empowers us to effectively prevent dewatering.

Learn the dos, don'ts, hows, and whys of the most important communications tool you have -- email. In this fun, interactive, hands on workshop, you learn how to get the most of your blast email tool. Get tips for coaxing more people to sign up for your emails, increasing the number of people who respond, and coordinating your email with Facebook, Twitter and more.

When is a stream not a stream? When do standards not apply? When is pollution okay? When a state decides to issue permits that do not protect streams, they do so by claiming that previously protected uses in the stream (such as aquatic life) do not exist and cannot be protected. In this session, we will feature the work of a Riverkeeper and PEER to uncover an egregious example of Clean Water Act violations and favoritism for a polluter. Will include an except from a new documentary film.

Join the Neuse Riverkeeper Foundation and Earth Force to hear about an exciting replicable program that reinforces community connections, environmental science curriculum, and can enhance or highlight ongoing work in your basin. We will discuss the real work of partnership negotiation and how to make a meaningful program last.

We will cover new regulatory developments at U.S. EPA as well as practical problems in getting antidegradation rules adopted for states and applying rules to NPDES and 404 permits,