Friends of The Winooski River Graphic

Outreach & Education


Photographer Unknown

Celebrate the Winooski

For nine years a consortium of organizations and individuals, has held Celebrate the Winooski! (CTW), the annual Montpelier based river cleanup and celebration. The Friends have been involved in CTW since its inception have adopted Celebrate as one of its many activities. The hope is that “Celebrate” will become a Winooski River-long series of events that could include riverbed cleanups, watershed education, school projects, arts performances, parades, exhibits, workshops, river tours and whatever else floats your boat, as the saying goes.

 


Photo by Ann Smith

Winooski Headwaters Festival

The Friends’ and our partners in the Headwaters will hold the Winooski Headwaters Festival in early October 2007. Last fall, over 80 people attended the Festival held at the Old School House Commons in Marshfield. They learned about stream ecology and stream dynamics at streamside workshops.  During lunch, they could browse through educational displays and talk with various river experts. Lunchtime also featured renowned Vermont folk singer, Colin McCaffrey and the UES River Voices (a children’s chorus). After lunch, there was a leisurely paddle down the Winooski River.

Speaker Series

In the spring of 2007, the Friends and partners hosted a speaker series on river related issues. Topics included invasive plant species, hydropower and aquatic species.  The Friends hope to continue speaker series through out the watershed.

 

Landowner Stewardship Guide

One of the keys to improving the overall health of the Winooski River is to help individual landowners, large and small, to be good watershed stewards. There is a considerable body of information and resources available to property owners. However, it comes in many forms and is spread out across a myriad of government agencies and organizations. The Friends’ hopes to develop a landowner information guide that will provide the necessary information and access to resources that will lead to the implementation of on site water quality and habitat protection practices. The landowner guide will address a range of items from the simple and inexpensive such as reducing lawn care inputs (pesticides, fertilizers, herbicides) and rain barrels to more complex and potentially expensive practices such as streambank stabilization and permanent land conservation. The guide will include information on financial resources that are available to landowners.