While Giving Tuesday might be over, our efforts continue! Please donate to our year-end fundraising campaign to support green streets and conservation efforts.
We’re providing the inspiration and tools for a growing movement of people to build water harvesting basins and plant trees in their yards and neighborhoods. In the water-strapped West, water harvesting is an essential way to green our neighborhoods with renewable rainwater instead of mining groundwater or diverting Colorado River water. Check out all our BYOB resources here.
Basins are simple to build, practical solutions that make changes at home and have a positive impact on our local creek, greater watershed, and global climate. Anyone can build one! Just ask our Stewards In Place, many of whom created their very own basin as part of our dispersed events.
Paula R shared, “I was so excited after the Build Your Own Basin workshop that, armed with my WMG design, I went out ahead of schedule to draw my outline and strategize on my very first basin! Thanks to the generosity of some volunteers I met on prior Co-op Workshops, I have a good start to a basin today!”
Your donation helps us ensure that everyone, everywhere, has the resources and information necessary to BYOB.
Students, who are stuck inside without the benefits of on-campus learning, are BYOBing, too. After brainstorming with Drachman-Montessori teacher Eric Flewelling, Joaquin Murrieta-Saldivar, WMG’s Cultural Ecologist, realized if they couldn’t bring the kids to the rain garden, they would bring the rain gardens to them with BYOB kits! Students will attend a virtual class with their teacher, receive handouts, pick up a BYOB kit—consisting of native trees and shrubs, wildflower seed balls, and mulch—and harvest the rain! This 3-minute video with Joaquin and students shows you how easy it can be to BYOB.
Eric says, "There is so much value in students creating truly sustainable systems themselves. There's nothing like standing under the cool canopy of a big beautiful happy wastewater-fed tree in a rain garden you designed and created. I've seen it with my students... the next thing you know, they're educating their parents and working on a basin at home together!”
Will you donate to support watershed management programming for youth through creative programs like these?
We’ll also be getting BYOB kits out to families in underserved neighborhoods in the new year. We want to ensure everyone can harvest rainwater as a free resource from Mother Nature to grow shade trees and native beauty in our yards. Thank you for joining our movement to plant the rain and dig basins to green your neighborhood and do something good for your watershed.
