What if you could see exactly how your gift helped our Watershed?

2025 Year-End Review by Our Board Chair, Maggie Favretti

November is the time of year to prepare for winter; It’s when we gather and store the lessons and gifts from the year in preparation for winter’s time of reflection and spring’s energetic bloom. We reflect on all we’ve accomplished this year with your support. Your donations, observations, volunteer hours, and collaborations have been essential to our mission to support the flourishing of all life within Connecticut’s Mystic River Watershed. With your support, we’ve developed historical relationships and partnerships to collaboratively restore the ecological health of our watershed, establish a new citizen science observation app, develop a living atlas repository of watershed information, engage with more than 300 local students, build a strong youth leadership council and continue our most important work: the Watershed Regeneration Action Plan, which we call the WRAP.

Thanks to your financial support, we:

• Served as the catalyst and convener bringing together tribal and non tribal partners together to take steps to ensure that keystone species like River Herring / Seeqanamâhsak will flourish in local waters.

• Developed a citizen science water quality monitoring program as part of the Pathogen Monitoring Network to monitor Lond and Bush Ponds and Williams and Whitford Brooks.

• Hosted 6 convenings of local and regional planners to identify how towns and Tribal nations can work together to keep us safe and improve watershed health

• In partnership with Save the Sound, the Eastern Connecticut Conservation District, Clean Up our Sound and Harbors, and the Wequetequock Cove Water Coalition established a regional ‘early warning’ bacteria lab

• Hosted nine community conversations to explore how our watershed can reduce flood risk, improve water quality, advance biodiversity, and better manage sewage and septic concerns in collaboration with Fuss and O’Neill.

• Engaged over 300 middle and high school-aged youth in design circles and field activities to articulate over 1000 ideas for watershed restoration and regeneration - from flood mitigation strategies to water quality issues affecting shellfish farming

• Used the priorities, ideas, and lived experiences shared by these students to help inform and guide our Watershed Regeneration Action Plan.

• Developed the beginning of our Bioregional Regeneration Curriculum and Strategy which strengthens our WRAP with support from The Nature Conservancy’s Resilient Southeastern Connecticut Program

• Hosted two public gatherings, including one Bioregional Feast, to celebrate our collective progress and to remind us of our inseparable relationships with land and water.

Each of these moments—the conversations, the shared learning, the students shaping real decisions—showed what happens when people choose to take responsibility for the places they love. It reminded me that this is not abstract work. It lives in classrooms and summer camp, in town halls, in fields and shorelines, and in the decisions we make together. 

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Our work must continue, even when things seem bleak. I get asked this question a lot: What makes you so hopeful?

This is a time when it would be easy to become overwhelmed. How will we take care of the waterways that sustain us? How do we address sea level rise and intensifying weather in a way that is equitable and beneficial to all? How will we manage the constant struggle to fully resource our work?

My answer is one of hope and resilience: I see more and more people investing all that they can in the collective wisdom that resides in our relationships; with ourselves, each other, with our whole interrelated web of life. I am heartened to see people raising their hands and offering their wealth of knowledge, time, and resources. 

The answers to our challenges might just be simpler than we think. Support of the Alliance for the Mystic River Watershed’s local, place-based programs leads to simple solutions for our communities and neighbors at a time when solutions feel very far off. 

Please help us reach our 2025 fundraising goal of $50,000 by donating to our year end campaign. We welcome support in whatever way feels meaningful to you, whether through a Donor Advised Fund, a gift of stock, the donations links on our website, or a check in the mail. 

I’d love to meet with you over coffee or a trail walk and hear what you’re hopeful about too.

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