Bringing the river home
If after participating in the Denkyem River Guardians program at Philadelphia’s Bartram’s Garden, a public garden on the banks of the Schuylkill River, a student sets out to become an environmental scientist or a recreational paddling guide, more power to them.
But Aseel Rasheed explained that the vision for the program is bigger than that. “What’s more important is that students develop an understanding of their own relationship to water — how it impacts them, how they impact it,” said Rasheed, who is the Public Programs Director for the garden.
“Those ideas are relevant whatever work you do — to your health, your family’s health, your environment.”
By the end of the multi-year paid internship program, designed to start the summer before 10th grade and continue through the end of high school (or sometimes beyond with seasonal positions at the garden) the goal is for that connection to the water to feel like a homecoming.
That’s why the program, which received a grant from the Delaware Watershed Conservation Fund this year, focuses on opening as many doors as possible for students to enter into a relationship with their waterways from the start. Before the start, in fact.
“We recruit students based on the waterway,” explained Joanne Douglas, Youth River Program Manager. “Most are from Southwest Philadelphia,” encompassing neighborhoods west of the Schuylkill River, “but as long as they live near the river or its tributaries, they’re eligible,” she said.
Once in the program, students participate in and inform a range of initiatives that focus on civic engagement, community science, and public access to the river — all of which interconnect.
During the summer, the students, along with about 100 volunteers, help run a free public boating program on the Schuylkill River — welcoming visitors, fitting them with life vests, and providing orientation to boating basics in kayaks and rowboats built by local middle schoolers. The students also play a role in investigating a continual threat to safe recreation on the water.
“One persistent problem we face is from combined sewer overflows,” said Chloe Wang, River Programs Coordinator. During heavy rainfalls, when the wastewater volume in a combined sewer system exceeds capacity, it overflows and discharges excess wastewater to nearby streams, rivers, or other water bodies. These combined sewer overflows can contain untreated human waste. Due to concerns about contaminants, Bartram’s Garden has cancelled the public boating program numerous times after rainstorms.
But Wang explained that the decision to cancel had always been based on precaution, rather than data. “We didn’t know how long we should wait after a rainfall, or how much rain was too much, because there was no relevant water-monitoring data collected in our section of the river.”
The U.S. Geological Survey and the Philadelphia Water Department conduct water monitoring on the Schuylkill above Fairmount Dam, but Bartram’s Garden is below the dam, as are all of the combined sewer overflows.
So they decided to take matters into their own hands. “We saw a meaningful opportunity to collect data to inform our own safety policies, and to help advocate for better protection of the health of the waterway,” Wang said.
Students are involved in both data collection, and resulting advocacy. Last year, they collaborated with the volunteers who support the public boating program to craft a letter that Wang submitted to the Department of Environmental Protection asking that the city prioritize water monitoring below the dam in accordance with the Clean Water Act’s provisions for protecting existing uses. “Recreation is very much an existing use in this part of the river,” she noted.
In addition to honing traditional civic-engagement skills, like letter writing, public speaking, and tabling, the students have opportunities to explore creative avenues for engagement that reflect their personal experiences and points of view.
One year, they did photography projects. Another year, they created infographics about wastewater to show to the public. This year, they are developing memes, a game and a podcast.
Regardless of the medium, the goal is the same: “We want the students be confident, civic participants,” Douglas said. “They work here, they live here, they observe what’s happening, they should have a say.”
Douglas and Wang observe students finding their voices as they progress through the program in the questions they ask, and in the roles they take on.
A subset of participants choose to become student leaders, and in this capacity, help to plan for incoming cohorts. One of the student leaders, Yasir, suggested they incorporate a lesson on how plants can help mitigate storm water overflows by absorbing excess water, explaining, “I built a garden in my backyard to do that.”
Another, Aiyanah, shares her ongoing efforts to convince friends to recycle. This fall, Aiyanah also elected to help Douglas and Wang build a rowboat that they ordinarily would have constructed with middle school students at the Richard Allen Preparatory Charter School in a class designed to complement their math curriculum. That class is not meeting this fall because of covid-19.
Because of the pandemic, this year’s summer portion of the Denkyem River Guardians program looked a little different too — there was no public boating, and the students only met as a group virtually.
But this challenge became an opportunity, true to the spirt of the program’s name. “The Denkyem ‘crocodile’ is an ancient Adinkra symbol used by the Asante people who originated from present day Ghana,” Douglas explained. “It represents adaptability and cleverness, drawing from the crocodile’s ability to live in water yet still breathe air.”
The students adapted, and gained something new by engaging with the material in a different way. They collected data at home with rain gauges, interviewed family members about the river, and mapped the drains in their homes and neighborhoods.
Even when alone at home, they could see how they connected to something bigger.
“The theme of everything we learn is that we are part of a whole,” Douglas said. “The Schuylkill River is not just this line that they cross to get from one side of the city to the other; it’s connected to the Delaware, it’s connected to the ocean. If there’s a piece of trash or a chemical that goes into the storm drains or the river, it doesn’t disappear.”
The takeaway message: “Everything we do has some type of impact, even if those impacts are not immediately visible.”
Likewise, the impact of the Denkyem River Guardians program might not be immediately visible in the lives of all of the students, but in changing their relationship to the river, their river, it has a lasting effect on each one.
“Not only does the river become accessible to you — you know it’s there, you can get to it, you can get on it — but it represents you,” Rasheed said.
This story is part of an ongoing series highlighting projects supported by the Delaware Watershed Conservation Fund that together show, when it comes to creating a sustainable future for wildlife and people, the whole is great than the sum of its parts.
