The Watershed Project

The Watershed Project's goals for K-12 Environmental Education in Richmond, San Pablo, Oakland, and San Franciso focus on under-resourced Title I schools. K-12 Environmental Education is our largest program.

"Building Watershed Connections" is a youth-led environmental education program that will provide access to rich, oftentimes new, experiences in urban and regional parks for 600 K-12 students at underfunded schools in the San Francisco Bay Area and for seven young adults from communities that have historically faced systemic racism who participate in The Watershed Project’s "Green Careers" paid internship program. TWP’s internship program provides opportunities for high school and community college-age youth from Contra Costa and Alameda Counties. As a key part of "Building Watershed Connections," the interns will serve as mentors for the younger students during park field trips, deepening their leadership and communication skills and providing a peer experience for the younger kids.

TWP internships provide high school students and college-ready young adults from local communities with paid work experience in the environmental field. Our goal is to inspire them to become the next generation of environmental stewards and leaders. Recognizing the reality that people of color, particularly those from underfunded communities, are underrepresented in the environmental field, we actively recruit these kids and young adults to participate in our internship program.

Program Objectives 2020-2021 School Year

* Build the leadership and communication skills of seven young adult interns from East Bay communities that have historically suffered systemic racism and poverty.
* Employ a youth-led model to design and implement the immersive intern field trips and the K-12 field trips.
* Deliver 4-6 interactive field trips to local and regional East Bay parks for 600 K-12 students from under-resourced schools in Richmond, San Pablo, and Oakland. We have reduced the number of students anticipated for this school year from our regular 1,500 served due to the COVID-19 pandemic. TWP will follow all safety protocols to ensure a clean and safe experience for all involved in the field trips.

Before the pandemic hit, we taught over 1,500 K-12 students every year in classrooms and outdoors with experiential nature exploration and service-learning activities. We work largely with schools in Richmond, San Pablo, and parts of Oakland and San Francisco as these cities experience both a higher susceptibility to environmental impacts and a higher % of families under the federal poverty threshold.

TWP is one of the few nonprofits offering environmental education programs for middle and high school students across the SF Bay Area. To address existing and exacerbated inequities in access to nature and high-quality science education, we prioritize schools with higher percentages (at least 50%) of low-income and minority students.

The Watershed Project brings a watershed perspective to the urban environment, promoting green design and supporting natural cycles. Through our award-winning environmental education and volunteer stewardship programs, we give children, youth, and adults the information, skills, and support they need to understand how watersheds work and how their individual and collective actions translate into healthier, stronger local communities.

TWP has provided educational services to West Contra Costa, Oakland, and San Francisco Unified School District schools for 20 years, teaching interactive watershed education curriculum to students of all ages (K-12) in the classroom and through hands-on outdoor field trips and service-learning activities. Our education programs directly serve more than 1,500 students around the SF Bay Area each year and we provide watershed stewardship opportunities for over 3,500 volunteers annually. We have employed young people from Richmond through our green careers programs and provided internships to local students since 2009. This project builds on our existing internship program, allowing it to be richer and stronger.

Our diverse staff includes biology and environmental education experts, who are highly knowledgeable about the San Francisco Bay and Pacific Ocean ecosystems and trained in youth engagement. Several of our staff are bilingual so as to meet the needs of our Spanish-speaking program participants.

Environmental Education 2019-2020: Before COVID-19 and school closures, we took over 500 students on 12 field trips to local creeks. Ordinarily, our K-12 education programs are a package deal of 2-4 classroom lessons combined with 1-2 field trips to local parks or restoration sites. Elementary students are exploring creeks in our Kids In Creeks and Explore Your Watershed programs. Middle school students participated in our From Me to the Sea program, where they learned about how trash can travel through a watershed to become marine debris. Their field trips were an opportunity for a trash cleanup, but also just to explore and form a relationship with the local shoreline ecosystem. In our Wild Oysters program, high school students participated in two field trips. They collect data to monitor the health of native Olympia oyster populations on our reef at Point Pinole and also visit Hog Island Oyster Company in Tomales Bay to learn about oyster farming. They get a lesson in shucking oysters and the opportunity to taste, if they wish!

In TWP's Greening the Urban Watershed Program, the Iron Triangle Urban Greening is a series of new bioswales, rain gardens, and trees on the Richmond Greenway from 16th – 20th Streets, built as an extension of the Unity Park in partnership with the Trust for Public Land. Once major construction was completed in 2018, TWP planted trees and (bio)swales throughout 2019, engaging many local volunteers along the way. A section of redbud trees had to be replaced with Coastal Live Oaks this year in March just before C-19 SIP. The project is near completion with signage now in process.

From Spring to Fall 2019, The Watershed Project planted 50 trees in North Richmond to expand the urban canopy in this industrially-impacted community. The benefits of trees are well-documented - here are just a few:
Reducing air pollution; Filtering stormwater, reducing pollution and flooding; Cooling the ambient temperature;
Providing habitat for wildlife; Residents who adopted the trees were involved in species selection and instructed in how often to water, the importance of mulching, and the importance of the urban forest. With the help of the community, student and corporate volunteers, 50 planting holes were dug, tree root balls were prepped and mulch was applied to give these trees a really good start.

In our Healthy Watersheds Program, this year we published our "Water Quality in Contra Costa" database for our robust water quality network, with the goal of making our data understandable and interesting to a non-technical audience. We feature multiple data sources, compare water quality parameters and sites, and include interpretive elements (including report cards) to help people understand why certain parameters are important and how they interact. And, over 2000 Volunteers at 26 sites in Contra Costa County participated in Coastal Cleanup Day in 2019. Collectively we removed nearly 22,000 gallons of trash.