Here are all the things that I've been up to:

• I was invited by the Community and Continuing Education person at Mt. Hood Community College to put together some syllabi for residential contractors fullfilling their new continuing education credit requirements. I proposed four classes titled:
  • Sustainable Site Planning (3 hours)
  • Best Practices for Sustainable Sites under Construction (2 hours)
  • Site Strategies for Energy and Fuel Efficiency (2 hours), and
  • Rain Gardens 201 Field Class (5 hours) to be held in Gresham.
    
• I've been talking to other cities to take my Rain Gardens 201 technical field class on the road. Steve Fancher at Gresham is the first taker. If you know of other cities that might be interested in helping me locate their facilities and pursue grants to lower the cost, please get in touch with me.
  
• I'm finalizing a fiscal sponsorship agreement with the Oregon Environmental Council so I'll be able to accept tax deductible donations for my side project called exactly what it is: Sustainable Land Development Resources for Design and Deliverables. Someday, this will be a free, comprehensive online resource for designers and project managers that step them through how to successfully incorporate a particular best management practice into their design and deliverables.
  
• I'm being videoed next week by Jen Seamans of the Southwest Watershed Resource Center to talk to homeowners in the southwest about what they can do to steward stormwater in a watershed graced by many miles of remaining streams not yet piped by development and challenged by high water tables, clay soils, and steep slopes.
  
• I presented my Sustainable Principles for Land Development to the Stormwater Solutions participants in Coos Bay last week and then stayed for a presentation on Port Orford's new stormwater ordinance. The most facinating thing about this presentation was how the outreach was conducted. Here's a recent writeup I shared on EPA's NPSINFO listserv:

I recently attended a presentation in Southern Oregon. Port Orford, a small town on the coast, set about adopting a new, LID based stormwater ordinance because they had very little infrastructure to receive runoff and wanted to protect their fishing industry, among other reasons. A city/NGO cooperative outreach effort was undertaken. Most people don’t use the internet much in this town, I suspect, because the economy is based on hard physical labor done in the outdoors, so the Port Orford Ocean Resource Team, (the NGO for outreach), used other methods too:

• They employed a “sense of place” in their outreach, stressing the “Land-Sea Connection”
• A newspaper article with Briana, the outreach coordinator’s, photograph spurred a lot of informal outreach and education. People would stop her in the street and ask to talk to her about the impact of stormwater on their town.
• They held a town hall, but recognized that people don’t like to go to extra meetings, so they had presentations that they brought to numerous civic groups’ regular meetings (the Rotary, watershed councils, etc.).  
• They placed a “one-pager” at 5 local businesses that everybody visits.
• They ordered free material from the EPA. Specifically, I remember Briana mentioned bookmarks that they put in their public library next to all the other bookmarks.

They probably did some other things, but I didn’t get those jotted down. The point is, even developers in the town were consulted, and the stormwater ordinance was passed without one negative comment from any community member and passed unanimously by the City Council.  

Oregon’s coastal communities are a string of small towns with populations of less than 10,000 with a similar reliance on natural resources, not computers, for their collective livelihoods. While I’m not denying that you can reach many people by the internet each community will be best served by a mix of outreach styles. I heard once there are 14 different ways that people learn something. That means we need 14 different ways of offering information if we want to not only reach, but also convince our audience that we’re offering information on practices that are good for everyone.