2022 Community Partner Meeting Highlights
2022 Community Partner Meeting
We’ve spent the last few weeks reflecting on the inspiring discussions, ideas and strategies you shared with us at Atlantic Water Network’s annual network meeting. Our time together helped continue meaningful conversations and allowed us to envision strategic next steps AWN should take to continue supporting you as a community partner.
First of all, thank you to all who attended our meeting! 58 community partners from Atlantic Canada and beyond joined together to help reflect on and shape our shared water priorities.
In case you missed it, take a read through our meeting highlights below. If you have any questions about the meeting or would like further information, you can contact us here.
Meeting Takeaways
Communications
Communication Specialist Amanda Doucette helped share some unique communication approaches like trendy social media posts and collaborative opportunities. The goal of this session was to identify new ways to work together as a network to battle communications barriers. We hope this session encouraged you to try something new and provided refreshing ideas to revamp your organization’s communications planning through the field season and beyond.
As a result of the discussions in the communications session, AWN will create training materials related to social media best-practices, how-to guides and opportunities for future collaboration throughout the network.
Water Monitoring Plans
Participants dipped into water monitoring planning with Research Manager Aislin Livingstone. In this session, community partners shared local water monitoring objectives, revealing commonalities and differences across watersheds and a rich diversity of strategies in place (or in the works!) to achieve their goals.
Participants underscored the importance of building consistency into water monitoring methods as a means of ensuring organizational continuity and high quality data collection.
Throughout the session we heard about the importance of peer-learning, mentorship, and knowledge-sharing around both the technical and operational aspects of running a successful water monitoring program. Your feedback will guide future projects and allow AWN to tailor our resources and support for water monitoring programs of all shapes and sizes.
Community Watershed Reporting
Program Manager Laura Chandler led a watershed reporting session where participants drew from vast examples of successful community reporting across Atlantic Canada to devise a dream plan and lay the groundwork for their watershed reporting goals.
Participants discussed the importance of consistency and accessibility. Reporting to communities should be sound and comparable for all organizations with diverse monitoring plans. The insight from these conversations will help AWN continue creating a watershed reporting framework to help communities across Atlantic Canada understand the health of their local watersheds.
Resource Palooza!
We tried something new this year and the title says it all! We know our network has a broad range of experience within the environment sector and we wanted to help showcase some of your valuable tools and resources.
A big thank you to several of our community partners for volunteering your time at the network meeting. Please take a look at our resource list for a directory of projects shared here.
We’d be remiss if we didn’t give a shout-out to the DataStream team for the amazing work they’re doing on the platform and for the beneficial assets they share with us everyday.
We’re truly inspired every day to work with such an amazing network and we can’t wait to see you again next year!
The Atlantic Water Network Team
