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.
