Watershed Initiative Training & Education Grant Recipients

International City/County Management Association
ICMA is a professional and educational association for appointed administrators in local government serving more than 8,000 members worldwide. The ICMA will implement training workshops that introduce participants to the principles of collaboration, conflict resolution, and consensus building; and, develop interactive training using Webcasts to educate participants through real-time question and answer sessions, and over the Internet with a slide show that includes screen shots, photos, or graphics.

River Network
River Network was founded in 1989 to assist grassroots river and watershed groups by providing training, capacity building resources, networking, and consultation services. River Network will use this funding for intensive training that will allow one-on-one training pilot projects in four states, evaluate and expand most effective pilots to other states as possible over the next three years. River Network will provide the training to the service providers. Pilot trainers will use consistent procedures and checklists to assess the ability of watershed organizations to undertake long-term watershed assessment, protection, restoration projects, help groups develop training plans, and utilize standardized and/or compatible training materials and resources to help reach their respective goals.

Southeast Watershed Forum
The Southeast Watershed Forum, founded in 1998, works with agencies, industries, and nonprofit organizations in a nine state area to enhance cooperative local, state, and regional watershed initiatives through education and training. The Southeast Watershed Forum will use this funding to give communities Growth Readiness training to enable them to update their development codes and storm water practices. The grant will also allow the Forum to expand into a virtual online resource for transferring innovative technical tools for watershed restoration, protection, management, and training tools linking their models to the nation.

University of Alaska, Anchorage
Resource Solutions is a program of the Environment and Natural Resources Institute of the University of Alaska Anchorage with a variety of qualifications ranging from developing and conducting training workshops to working to facilitate and mediate participants working in projects that deal with watersheds, water quality, and rural Alaska projects. Using Watershed Initiative funds Resource Solutions will build the capacity and capability in Alaska to address the issues in a collaborative manner through the use of training workshops such as the Watershed Planning Workshop along with the Alaska Natural Resources Leadership Initiative (ANRLI) to enable participants to develop leadership skills for planning and problem solving on water quality and to understand how collaborative approaches can be used in watershed planning.

Center for Watershed Protection
The Center for Watershed Protection is a national organization dedicated to the protection and restoration of watersheds by advancing effective land and water management techniques. This assistance grant will allow the Center to provide a much broader distribution of techniques and tools for watershed protection and restoration, and provide education and training to watershed leaders each year. The grant will further help the Center to organize these efforts into three delivery mechanisms: 1) Watershed Leadership Institute; 2) Interactive Distance Learning; and, 3) Community Watershed Assistance. These programs will help to encourage watershed groups to become more active partners in the national effort to protect and restore watersheds.