Ridge To Reefs Inc

Baltimore compost collective - engages baltimore teenagers with positive employment opportunities and training in workforce skills, food access programming, farming and community-scale composting. Youth gain guided, hands-on experience managing a small-scale composting operation. Compost they create is used to grow fresh produce. Healthy, locally produced food in the urban landscape addresses critical food deserts and builds resilient communities. Baltimore compost collective's operation is more than traditional methods applied in the urban landscape; they're innovating new and better ways to boost food production in community gardens and finding creative ways to repurpose additional sources of waste into healthy effective fertilizer.

Restoration coordination - coordinating and implementing watershed plans. This includes writing proposals, working on policy changes, coordination of interagency efforts, local communities and municipalities to ensure that implementation efforts are successful. This has included tracking down on-going sources of pollution and working with the appropriate agencies to see the issues are resolved. Places where we have been doing this work include the guanica watershed in sw puerto rico, vatia watershed in american samoa and places like the sassafras river, an agricultural watershed on the eastern shore of maryland and the st. Marys river in southern maryland where the watershed is experiencing tremendous growth due to a naval base realignment which if not well managed will threaten the health of the river.

Helping build more resilient communities - helping communities build more resilience including rainwater harvesting and solar energy. This includes designing and building several off-grid solar walk-in refrigerators in puerto rico as well as a mobile unit and designing and implementing solar water filtration and pumping projects for agriculture, resilience and health facilities.

Watershed planning - work with local communities and stakeholders to create watershed plans to help improve the protection and restoration of water and ecosystems within specific watersheds (the area draining to someplace people care about - a river, a bay, a coral reef). Communities help to define the goals and strategic projects and actions are defined as well as potential responsible parties, the expected costs and benefits. One of ridge to reefs goals is to perform at least one watershed planning project a year - examples have included the culebra watershed action plan (in draft), the la parguera green infrastructure plan and the cabo rojo watershed plan being initiated in 2013 and the vatia watershed plan completed in 2019. Our emphasis has been to support the implementation of watershed plans not just their creation - we support the creation of these plans by assisting with funding proposals, policy and behavior change, implementation of restoration practices and helping build the skill set of local groups and municipalities for continued implementation and protection efforts.

Green infrastructure - recreates natural systems to perform ecosystem functions within the urban environment - this includes bioretention practices, bio-filters, urban tree planting to reduce stormwater runoff and practices that include urban agriculture and green roofs. The practices help perform phytoremediation, restore urban soils and ecosystem function where it is most needed. Ridge to reefs, with its partners, implemented 8 green infrastructure projects in the last two years including bioretention, rain gardens, woodchip bioreactors, p-filters, rainwater harvesting and a sand biofilter. Over fiftteen thousand plants, mostly native, were planted in these projects to restore ecosystem function and reduce pollution and help cleanse contaminated stormwater runoff. We worked with local communities, landscape architects, engineers and developers to integrate these practices into their sites. Locations for this work included la parguera and tamarindo beach in culebra both in puerto rico, west maui in hawaii and the eastern shore of maryland and the st. Mary's river watershed in southern maryland.