SAVE BUFFALO BAYOU

Our founding mission was to protect one of the last forested, publicly accessible stretches of Buffalo Bayou flowing through the center of Houston. We were successful. This started us on the path of educating the public and policy makers not just about the outdated assumptions behind that project but also about our outdated flood management policies in general. We now work to bring attention to wider issues of floodplain and flood risk management in the county. We are fighting to influence current policies and practices and bring them in line with advanced thinking elsewhere in the country and around the world. We try help people understand why we are flooding and the most effective way to do something about it. We hope to prevent costly, high-maintenance flood control projects that destroy our streams and the environment and ultimately won't work.

Our strategy is primarily advocacy journalism. We investigate, research, write and publish articles on our website, in local newspapers and on our Facebook page. We have more than 7,600 followers on our Facebook page. We also send our articles and information to more than 1,000 members of the media, politicians and civic leaders. We speak on the radio and to civic groups, meet with politicians, attend conferences, and network with other organizations involved in related activities such as prairie, wetland, and forest preservation, and protection against flooding. We use our marketing and communications experience and contacts to help other organizations publicize their issues and activities also.

Our executive director, Susan Chadwick, is an accomplished writer and journalist with decades of experience. She is a native Houstonian who grew up on Buffalo Bayou and happens to know a whole lot of influential people. In addition, our advisory board includes working geologists, environmental and earth scientists, and one of the world's leading river experts.

We have succeeded in stopping the project we opposed, a project to strip, dredge, and reroute more than a mile of one of the last publicly-accessible, forested stretches of Buffalo Bayou in the city. We managed, through our articles and editorials, to change the conversation, create a debate, and bring new facts into the discussion. We pointed out serious conflicts of interest. We have now widened the discussion to floodplain management and policy in general, helping to clarify issues and misunderstanding about stream function and solutions to flooding for people who live and work up and down the bayou, many of whom flooded badly during Hurricane Harvey. The impulse is to blame the river, to think that nature and protection from flooding are somehow at odds. There are calls to straighten and dredge all of the bayou. Our mission now is to explain that working with nature for flood management is the best, most effective, and cheapest solution.