Discouraged, the citizen is led to believe that there is little that can be done, and she or he must be the only one concerned about the stream. The lost energies of these citizens are a great opportunity cost for the health of our streams. The CWP was initiated as part of an EPA section 319 nonpoint source grant.
Schools function as the hub of each watershed team.
Each participating school has a liaison to the project and equipment, such as storm drain stencils and kick-seine nets. Interested citizens can plug in through their local school to participate in stream monitoring and other watershed activities. The various components of the Community Watershed Project are outlined below. The first step in actualizing the watershed team approach was to identify individual watersheds that made sense from an organizing and management standpoint. These watersheds could not be too big so that organizing became cumbersome, or too small so as to lack critical mass.