We’re making a difference… one impact report at a time!

At Water Rangers, we’re always looking for ways to ensure we’re making an impact. We do this by creating tools that communities can use to help fill data gaps, promoting equality, prompting action, inspiring environmental connection, and developing innovative ways to make it easier for anyone to join us.

We do our best to keep track of this effort through surveys and feedback from our community. This post reveals just a few pages from a couple of our amazing impact reports, showing what we’ve accomplished over the past few years! You can also view the full list of impact reports here.

How do we tell these stories?

We try and celebrate our community on social media throughout our testing season, but one of the most fulfilling things we do is put together an impact report for our funders and community at the end of each project. Taking the time to reflect on our successes and presenting results in a way that everyone can understand is just one way that we try to thank our community for all of their efforts. It also reminds our team that we’re doing good and important work.

If you’re like us, you might also like looking at how far we’ve come in the past few years. While our mission remains the same, our ability as an organization to offer simple tools that work for communities has blossomed. We couldn’t have done it without our generous funders and our community who continue to support us!

We’re helping to fill water quality data gaps

First and foremost, we create water quality tools that make it easier for communities to participate in water monitoring. That has meant developing water quality testkits that are easy-to-use, accurate, and affordable. They also need to be built for getting results in the field by people new to water science… A challenge for any designer! Alongside that, we built a platform for communities to collect and view water quality data in a format that is accessible. Our funders help us work with communities with specific goals. Usually, our grants support specific regions. It’s through tracking our participants and getting their feedback that we’ve been able to improve these tools year after year.

Create more equality in water testing

Our mission is to help communities fill data gaps so that they can know when their water is healthy and when it needs help. That means providing tools to communities who need them and helping them learn how to test and advocate for waterways. One of our goals for all our grant programs is to provide opportunities for new water stewards, especially amongst those least represented. We also aim to provide a minimum of 25% of all of our equipment from grants to Indigenous groups.

Action

When we talk about action, we’re often not only looking for more people testing for water more consistently but also how the new knowledge translates into change on the ground. We know that those people who participate in water monitoring also get involved in other stewardship activities, like shoreline planting, clean-ups, educating others, and advocacy. Through our programs, we provide resources so more people can find more ways to contribute to water health, whether through our partners or on their own.

Building confidence to make change

We’re also curious about how our tools are empowering communities. Do they feel more knowledgeable about their local waterbody? Did they become teachers? Do they visit the water more often? Are we creating space for new environmentalists to be nurtured? Overwhelming, the answer is yes. Plus, they tell us how much fun they have doing their water tests!

Innovate so we can make bigger changes

We’re constantly trying to find more ways to make it easier than ever for our communities to collect water quality data and share it. We know that it’s the only way to achieve the scale to make big differences for our waterways. So, our impact reports also explore our new innovations, how we’re building new technology, and how we’re testing things with the help of our community.

That’s not all!

That’s just a sneak peek from 5 of our impact reports. There’s so much more in each of them, including stories and stats on what we’ve done. You can explore some of our Impact Reports here!