This sounds like an awesome project:
RiverLink is pleased to be working with yet another dedicated group of volunteers and professionals to create an innovative new demonstration project for homeowners.
In the South French Broad neighborhood, Michelle Smith, a private property owner has offered her home as a demonstration site for an innovative whole systems permaculture project to reclaim urban water for jobs, the environment and food production.
This idea offered a perfect opportunity for Michelle Smith, RiverLink and Waterlinks, LLC, to work in tandem to create LinkingWater, a project to reclaim urban water for jobs, environment and food
Sherry Ingram principal of Waterlinks, is a licensed geologist who became inspired by the work of the T.R.E.E.S project in Los Angeles and decided to try and bring those ideas to WNC. She teamed up with Asheville homeowner and urban sustainability enthusiast Michelle Smith who was working to create an urban food forest and garden on her property in the Southside of downtown Asheville. Michelle is offering her home and creativity because she believed that restoring and protecting urban streams like Nasty Branch that flows past her home on Choctaw Street offers a perfect opportunity for community building and can help inspire urban sustainability in her neighborhood and the entire city. Working together a three-phase plan for linking neighbors to restore and protect the stream’s urban watershed was developed under the RiverLink umbrella since this fit perfectly with the organization’s on-going projects for environmental protection and economic sustainability of the French Broad River watershed.
The goals of the Linking Waters project are:
Demonstrate safe, effective, easily accessible methods and materials that a large portion of a community can use to increase the amount of water stored in the soil and replenish the ground water.
Measure the reduction in storm water runoff and contaminating sediment, the increase in groundwater infiltration and the cost savings to property owners.
Demonstrate the potential for creating green jobs and building positive relationships in the community.
The first demonstration will be at Michelle Smith’s home but the goal is to replicate this at 10 or more residences in the neighborhood. The team is thinking big and wants eventually to share this process and product with the entire state as a low cost, low tech way to protect and conserve water.