Mission: Promote community-based environmental monitoring, awareness, and education while inspiring and advancing personal and scholastic achievement. We do this because working with our young people and helping our environment gives us hope for the future of our community.
What we do: Austin Youth River Watch is an environmental after school mentoring program. Our goals are that all AYRW students will graduate from high school and that they will learn and teach others how to monitor water. Students who have participated longer help mentor newer students. Several evenings a week, students from The University of Texas at Austin mentor AYRW students too. The university students are participants in the Hornsby Bend Ecological Mentorship Program.
Daily routine: After school, the program coordinator picks up eight to ten students. They go to one of the creeks or to the Colorado River and monitor water. Afterwards, they go back to the River Watch house where they eat snacks and do homework or work on school or personal projects. At the end of the evening, the coordinator drops off each student.
Summer Activities: In the summer, Austin Youth River Watch students meet on two days a week. We test water at one or two of the fourteen sites we monitor, eat snacks and then have good summer adventures including: swimming, canoeing, hiking, spelunking, touring nature, art and history museums, etc.
Camping: Once or twice each semester and during the summer, the students go camping. On the camping trips students do activities such as orienteering courses, beach clean up at the end of the Colorado River, visiting a Bat Cave, learning more in depth about water monitoring like identifying water bugs, etc.
Ecological Learning Adventures: During Spring Break, Austin Youth River Watchers have Ecological Learning Adventures. Students camp out for four or five days and do activities such as hiking, touring caves, visiting family farms or unique environments such as prairies or deserts. On many of these trips students attended who had not left Austin before.
The students: *Austin Youth River Watch was created twelve years ago by the Austin City Council in response to the pleas of parents concerned about their young people getting involved in gangs and delinquent behavior such as drive by shootings. The parents spoke before the Austin City Council saying that they needed some activity to help improve the situation. At the same time, there was a network of volunteer monitors associated with the Lower Colorado River Authority's Colorado River Watch Network already in some of the high schools. The students at these schools helped train the students of the new program, the Austin Youth River Watch. Since its creation, the students of the Austin Youth River Watch have taught each other how to monitor water. First they learn, then they teach. Mentoring has proven a very successful tool for the students of this program over the last twelve years. As an incentive to reach the new River Watchers, the students are given a small financial incentive for their efforts with the weekly monitoring and homework.
Recruiting students: At most of the schools, we have a teacher who helps identify students for the Austin Youth River Watch. At some schools, it is an Assistant Principle or an after school activities coordinator.
* Wes Halverson in Keynote address at Stream Savers, A Celebration of 10 years of the Austin Youth River Watch, October 18, 2003, Bee Caves, Texas.
Email riverwatcher@ayrw.org for Permission.
Page last updated 13 December, 2006
Page created on 6 January, 2004