HIGH FIVE, SWEETWATER!
For more than five years, Sweetwater Collaborative has taken a front and center role offering practical solutions to the drought in our Santa Barbara community and beyond.
Please honor our five+ years of service making Santa Barbara water wise in ways that are beautiful, practical, and that build community. Make a contribution in any amount that has to do with FIVE-- Multiples of FIVE, numbers that include a FIVE, or end in a FIVE.
Our 2016 Accomplishments
We continued to provide water wise awareness, water wise education, and water wise re-landscaping to community members on the South Coast.
- We established our Rainwater Harvesting 101 and Greywater 101 classes that have been held almost every month since February 2016. These classes provide basic information about rainwater harvesting and greywater practices, concepts, examples, and guidelines.
- We increased the number of hands-on workshops we led from twelve in 2015 to sixteen in 2016.
- We stepped up our advocacy for rainwater harvesting in neighborhoods, into parkways and on the street through curb cuts and other means, practices that will bring the community together to help each other to prevent pollution and flooding and to help to preserve more street trees
- We reached out to and provided support to more community organizations, agencies, HOAs, and multi-family residential complexes looking for ways to become more water wise.
- We led the effort to put in a Rainwater Harvesting Demonstration Garden at the Carpinteria Valley Water District; the earthworks were completed in September and the planting in November 2016.
- We worked to give community members the level of support they need to move forward on projects that reduce water use in our community at large. Individuals may get all the information they need to move forward on a water wise installation through taking one of our classes, or having one consult. Others can move forward on their own after having a design done. Still others want focused consulting or coaching, or get their project done through a hands-on workshop. And others prefer to get a referral to a landscape company who can do the work for them. We want to help individuals switch to water wise systems in just about any way they want to do that. We provided site visits, consulting, design, coaching and community goodwill outreach and education in order to do this.
- We have continued our commitment to professional development through our monthly Technical Round Tables for Landscape Professionals, which started in Sept 2015.
- We continue to try to fund a program to provide hands-on training for maintenance gardeners so that they can use best practices to make landscapes more water wise, and to maintain such landscapes.
You can also click on the contribute button on the left sidebar of any page on our website, at the bottom of the blue widget, or send a check to PO Box 134, Santa Barbara, CA 93102
_____$15 _____$25 _____$50 _____$55 _____$105 _____$250 _____other
thanks,
barbara wishingrad, Coordinator, Sweetwater Collaborative
The path isn't a straight line; it's a spiral.
You continually come back to things you
thought you understood, and see deeper truths.