Iowa Water Conference preview – Dec 3, 9-10:30

If you’re going to be in Ames the morning of Thursday, December 3, please stop by the 2nd floor of Agronomy Hall from 9-10:30 a.m. The Iowa Water Center will host a poster session featuring the Ames High School Bluestem Institute students and their Project Localize water quality posters (yes, the same ones that will be at our special event in March!).

Come for the coffee and donuts, stay for these incredible posters. Instructors Chad Zmolek, Mike Todd, and Joe Brekke are preparing their students for their presentation at the Iowa Water Conference in March, where the students will partake in a breakout session entitled “Water in Iowa: Voicing the Lexicon” followed by a break where they will exhibit their posters. (Not to mention the gallery session at CY Stephens the evening of March 23!)

If that’s not enough to entice you (as if coffee and donuts didn’t get you hooked in the first place), we will also hand out copies of the full 2016 Iowa Water Conference agendas. This is an exclusive sneak peek into the program for 2016 – the full agenda will be released on the Iowa Water Center website on Friday, December 4, and the Iowa Water Conference website will be updated soon thereafter.

This is an exciting time for water in Iowa – we hope you’ll join us!

Generosity, Gratitude, and Conservation

We are certainly thankful, as Jackie is, for our partners – particularly Iowa Learning Farms and Water Rocks! for continually spreading the conservation message with joy and wit. Wishing everyone a great Thanksgiving, and we hope this Thursday you’ll consider a “Thanksgiving Commitment” to be so grateful for our natural resources that you are generous in your actions toward making it better.

Iowa Water Center seeks partners for community arts event

We’ve got something brewing over here at the Iowa Water Center, and we’re pretty excited about it.

This year is the tenth anniversary of the Iowa Water Conference (in its current form), so we thought we’d make it kind of special. The conference agenda (which will be released soon!) is particularly spectacular this year, but we can always do more.

The idea started off that we’d have Luther professors Jodi Enos-Berlage and Jane Hawley bring their Body of Water performance to Ames for conference goers to attend on the first night of the conference. This multimedia approach to water education seemed like a provocative addition to our two-day event, and we’ve had requests for several years to bring back an evening reception/activity for those attending from out of town. A lovely idea!

But then, we learned about a project that local Ames High School students are working on that also combines art and water education. The students within The Bluestem Institute at AHS are creating photo collages combined with text from interviews to define water quality terms from a technical, social and cultural perspective. They’ll be presenting during the Iowa Water Conference, but the work they’re doing is something to behold, so we didn’t want to limit it to conference attendees.

LIGHTBULB. Gallery session before the Body of Water performance. A community event, adjacent to the Iowa Water Conference, but not solely for paid attendees. Invite the community, far and wide.  These unique approaches to water outreach and education need to reach as many people as possible. Our state has some incredibly innovative environmental education efforts (Water Rocks!, anyone?), and it’s our job to display, disseminate, expose and otherwise facilitate learning. We at the Iowa Water Center are on a mission to better the state of water in the state of Iowa. Education and outreach are a big part of that.

But, we can’t do it alone. We want this evening event to be well-attended and free of charge to patrons. So we’re asking for partners – be it financial sponsors, connectors, marketers – whatever you can do to help make this happen, we want to talk to you. If you are interested in learning more or helping us brainstorm, contact us. We can’t wait to talk with you!