River Rally Program

River Network is accepting session proposals for River Rally 2024 through November 10.

If you are interested in sharing your work at River Rally 2024, you’re in the right place! The River Rally program will include a variety of learning content and session types designed for the myriad ways people across the network want to learn from and engage with their fellow water, justice, and river advocates.

Read through the River Rally Session Proposal Submission Guidance for information on how to prepare and submit your proposal, as well as information on the proposal selection process and the discounts and scholarship opportunities available to speakers.

Before submitting your session proposal, please carefully review all session types to determine which is best suited to sharing your work and/or expertise. If you have questions about which session type to submit, contact the River Rally team at riverrally@rivernetwork.org.

River Network is accepting proposals for the following session types:

River Network is also accepting suggestions for the following events at River Rally 2024:

What We’re Looking For

River Rally is where the network of water, justice, and river advocates come together to build connections and share successes, challenges, learnings, and tools. We equip and connect advocates at the local, state, and federal levels to advance and implement policy, increase investments, and build power for greater collective impact and action.

The sessions selected for inclusion in the River Rally program should strengthen the broader movement by building knowledge and skills, diversifying perspectives and solutions, recognizing achievements within the network, and strengthening connections. Your proposed session should speak to the advocates, community leaders, program managers, scientists, educators, communicators, fundraisers, and/or riverkeepers who work to protect their communities and waterways.

Suggested Topics

Your River Rally session proposal should strive to strengthen organizations and leaders to improve and protect their waterways, create climate-resilient communities, and/or ensure equitable access to safe, affordable drinking water. This network is also committed to centering equity, diversity, and inclusion, creating strong organizations and leaders, effective advocacy and policy, and science in action.

Here, you’ll find a wish list of River Rally session topics that are top-of-mind for the network. We are still accepting suggestions through this feedback form, which will remain open through November 10. Note that this list is by no means comprehensive! Your proposed session, whatever the topic, should speak to the advocates, community leaders, program managers, scientists, educators, communicators, fundraisers, and/or riverkeepers who work to protect their communities and waterways. 

  • Environmental justice in action
  • Wetland and riparian restoration
  • Strategies for increasing data literacy for smarter software adoption, and other data to action tools
  • Creating climate resilient communities in practice
  • Community engagement and education
  • AI, implications for nonprofits
  • No code operations for nonprofits
  • Plastic pollution and litter mitigation
  • Writing public comments
  • Agency + NGO relationships
  • Addressing PFAS and emerging contaminants using watershed-based approaches
  • Navigating federal funding
  • Introduction to ArcGIS / ESRI
  • Anti-displacement and inclusive development
  • Ethical grantmaking
  • Building relationships & engaging with the media
  • Rural watershed restoration and scalability
  • Citizen science
  • Workforce development and capacity building
  • Funding alternatives to grants and assessments

Do you have a topic to suggest? Complete the survey!

Who Attends River Rally?

River Rally 2022 was attended by representatives of local, regional, and national nonprofit organizations (76%); government agencies (14%); academic institutions, including high schools (4%); tribal entities (3%); and unincorporated community groups (1%) from 43 states.

Explore our impact reports to learn more about who attends River Rally.

Registration Discount & Scholarship Opportunities

River Network provides speakers and presenters with a $150 discount on their total registration cost, as well as scholarship and volunteer opportunities that provide greater financial support as needed. The scholarship and volunteer applications will open on January 2 and close on February 8, 2024. We do our best to prioritize River Rally speakers in the scholarship allocation process, but please note that this is not always possible. Please explicitly state your scholarship needs in both your session proposal form and, eventually, in the scholarship or volunteer application form that will become available on January 2, 2024.

To be among the first to be notified of the scholarship and volunteer application period, subscribe to our mailing list to receive all River Rally updates.