Thursday November 13th and Friday November 14th, Gunpowder RIVERKEEPER®’s Theaux Le Gardeur attended the Pittsburgh conference in-person and staffers attended virtually via the live-stream to network with WATERKEEPERS across the continent.
Highlights from the live-stream included a session on tips and tricks for leveraging dollars, disaster response strategies, making “non-traditional” allies, and monitoring how road salt impacts our waterways.
Many presenters and participants in the discussion about fundraising and sustainability had suggestions for grant funders and other resources. Several RIVERKEEPERS® from the Southern United States discussed how recent storms and floods triggered a disaster response, and our downstream neighbor Blue Water Baltimore’s Baltimore Harbor WATERKEEPER, Alice Volpitta, took the podium to discuss their response to the Key Bridge collapse.
“Non-traditional” ally suggestions included sports fishermen and Indigenous Peoples. The Coosa RIVERKEEPER® Justinn Overton discussed how she attended fishing tournaments and fish frys to engage with her community, and she shared an interview featuring some of the last speakers of the Muscogee language who spoke about their people’s history of the river and told for the first time their people’s origin of the name “Coosa.”
The last talk covered Road Salt and featured speakers from the Lake George Waterkeeper in New York and the Ottawa Garde-Rivière from Quebec. Tips included measuring actual salt dispersal vs expected dispersal, using a “live-edge” plow to better scrape snow off roads, and using brine to prevent road icing.
Overall, the summit provided a forum to connect the members of the Waterkeeper Alliance in the same way out waterways connect the world and a reminder that the work we do is universal and integral. Gunpowder RIVERKEEPER® hopes to implement some of these new practices and methods to improve water quality in our own backyard.