Silver City Watershed Keepers

The Silver City Watershed Keepers is a volunteer environmental quality monitoring group coordinated by the Gila Resources Information Project (GRIP). Volunteers donate their time and talents to help protect our local Silver City watershed near where they live, work, and play through monitoring, community outreach and education. Their efforts provide quality data and build stewardship of the Silver City watershed.

The Silver City Watershed Keepers was created in 2010, as part of the Office of Surface Mining/Volunteers In Service To America (OSM/VISTA)’s Western Hardrock Watershed Team (WHWT) three-year grant program awarded to GRIP (2010-2013). The OSM/VISTA WHWT grant provides GRIP with a full-time volunteer position that fulfills the mission of the WHWT “to address environmental degradation and community impoverishment, providing rural mining communities with the skills and capacity they need to make their neighborhoods / watersheds better places to live and work.” Coordinated by the OSM/VISTA, GRIP has been able to mobilize community members to become “citizen scientists” for the Silver City Watershed Keepers. The past three years of OSM/VISTA leadership have been invaluable to the SCWK, as the capacity of SCWK has successfully grown with each new OSM/VISTA at GRIP.

For more information regarding the WHWT, visit the WHWT’s homepage, www.hardrockteam.org.

*GRIP would like to thank the Norcross Foundation for awarding GRIP a grant to purchase its own monitoring equipment for the Silver City Watershed Keepers!