The Community Watershed Stewardship Program (CWSP) is a 16-year partnership between the Portland Bureau of Environmental Services (BES) and Portland State University. The program engages Portlanders in enhancing the health of our watersheds while promoting public awareness of our connection to these natural systems. It offers funding for community projects that enhance watershed health, help with project planning, and assist in connecting community groups with resources for their projects.
This poster will explore the ability of CWSP to act as a workable model for how the public sector can partner with higher education to foster ecological stewardship in an urban setting. Recent Program evaluation has shown that since 1995, CWSP has granted $970,000 to 198 projects. As of mid 2011, these funds were matched by $3.1 million in community support through donations of services, materials and volunteer time. Over 41,000 people have donated 326,000 volunteer hours, planted 135,000 native plants and trees, restored over 63 acres of riparian and upland habitat, and enhanced over 36,000 linear feet of streams.
While CWSP has achieved success in stimulating small-scale stewardship activity, gaps still remain. New GIS mapping of past project site locations has revealed that grant awards have not been evenly distributed throughout the City of Portland, with concentrations around the inner city and watersheds with still-flowing streams and highly visible natural resources. While these areas are not unimportant, this concentration of City investments raises the question for CWSP program managers of how to achieve a more equitable allocation of resources for watershed improvement infrastructure and education throughout the City.
Results/Conclusions
Several steps have been made to address this issue. These steps include enlisting the support of students (as funding allows) to act as equity coordinators who assist in identifying new community groups that may be interested in beginning a watershed health project; targeted outreach and advertising to neighborhood organizations in underserved areas; and partnership building with youth volunteer and minority worker corps to increase engagement in the Program.
BES has also initiated an effort to assess project performance and the factors that contribute to a project's long-term success. This ongoing review may include site assessment visits by BES personnel and surveys administered to previous grant recipients to examine the technical success of the projects, the level of ongoing community involvement in maintaining the projects, and the perceived benefit to the community from these projects.