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Illustrative Project
The Protection Fund was created to support innovation, encourage
risk taking and catalyze action at a scale relevant to the
world's largest freshwater ecosystem-the Great Lakes. About
one third of the projects that the Fund has supported to date
have been submitted in response to the Fund's general guidelines.
Another third have been developed in response to one of the
Fund's periodic supplemental requests for preproposals. The
remaining third have been initiated in one way or another
by the Fund in cooperation with technical advisors and the
project leaders.
The Fund's guidelines for funding
describe, in general terms, the characteristics of projects
that the Fund wishes to support. These guidelines are meant
to be general for two reasons. First, the Fund wishes to remain
open to new ideas. The best projects have yet to be designed.
Second, each project is unique. There are no "one size
fits all" rules.
Yet, successful projects share several characteristics. They
have specific ecological goals, they take action based on
new opportunities and they are designed and executed by collaborative
teams. For this reason, most successful projects are relatively
large undertakings that require a fair amount of time to develop
and implement.
A project led by American Rivers illustrates these principles.
The project:
…had specific ecological goals. The team was
going to work on modifying operations at over 90 dams draining
into four of the five Great Lakes. They hoped to accomplish
eight specific objectives at each of these facilities including
restoring dissolved oxygen levels to those required to support
fishery uses, restoring thermal regimes to those required
to support fishery uses, returning the timing of flows to
a pattern more like a free flowing stream, and increasing
the population, distribution and health of fish in the tributaries
and open lakes. By the end of the project the team had improved
the health of more than 1250 miles of streams, removed three
dams, and removed barriers to fish passage at 45 other locations.
…took action based on new opportunities. Never
before had the re-operation of dams been approached on a Great
Lakes basin scale. The groups involved shared expertise, coordinated
their ecological objectives and developed a new model of collaborative
relicensing efforts. The team took advantage of the emerging
science of flow restoration and tested new ways of ensuring
that the region's power needs could be met while improving
the health of the basin's water dependent natural resources.
…was designed and executed by a collaborative team.
The project supported the work of seventeen named individuals
in fourteen different organizations. The organizations included
citizen groups, power generation companies, transmission companies,
and various units of government. The project team represented
the full range of interests.
…was designed at the appropriate scale. The project
required a great deal of coordination to meet its ambitious
ecological goals. As described above, it engaged a wide range
of stakeholders, it operated at multiple sites throughout
the basin, and it applied cutting edge science to develop
an entirely new model of licensing and operating dams in the
basin for the benefit of the ecosystem. The request matched
the sizeable undertaking.
…involved multiple conversations. American Rivers
first approached the Fund in 1995 with a coalition of groups
seeking to restore flows and biological connectivity between
the Lakes and a set of tributaries, and within a set of tributary
streams. They took time to further engage stakeholders and
develop their ideas into specific plans for action and returned
in 1996. That year, the Fund awarded the collaborative team
the first of two $250,000 grants to support its work.
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