Committee Members Needed

To All Water Quality Monitoring Volunteers, (past, present, and future),

WRWA board members had a retreat in January and met again last evening to start the implementation of some of our goals. We need people like you to help us out since a board of six members cannot possibly have a corner on the market of expertise, enthusiasm, and vision that is needed to help WRWA pursue its organizational goals and continue our flagship Water Quality Monitoring Program (WQMP). We need people like you to rally around this program that takes organization, time commitment, and other skills.

We would be grateful to you if you can help WRWA in the following ways:
1. Be willing to meet with other volunteers for initial discussions that build a vision of how to organize and structure this year’s program. (Rebecca Salem has been program director for the past two years, and she is now our Board president. She will give guidance and resources, and answer questions, but she cannot undertake the full organization and report writing since we have other objectives to work on this year as a Board.)
2. The initial meeting(s) can help us build a network of WQMP volunteers and reveal the strengths and degree of commitment of all of you, possibly in the areas of grant and report writing.
3. Volunteering to provide leadership for this project. We will not be able to continue without you.

Our continuing with this program is contingent upon recruiting an intern. For the water quality monitoring to continue, we have applied for an intern through SCA who will possess the necessary skills. We will not know if SCA can provide us with this intern until March. This intern will ultimately be the point person in administering the program. In the meantime, however, we need to know that he/she will have a group of dedicated volunteers, some of you who may volunteer to drive to Waterbury to take the water samples to the lab for testing or do other tasks in addition to collecting the samples. (We have investigated having the samples mailed to Waterbury, but the window of time for getting the samples tested cannot be met this way.)

We are applying for grant money for the lab tests so the WQMP committee of volunteers does not have to worry about that significant expense.

We can do this, but we need you! Please email Rebecca Salem, Board President at westriver@vermontel.net to let us know if you can help out, and then we’ll set a date for a meeting. Thanks!