READ ABOUT
Our Mission & History
Growing Greener Communities (GGC) is an initiative to create healthy waterways, improve quality of life, and limit climate change impacts in our communities like increased heat, precipitation, and flooding. We support small-scale projects on a wide range of properties to make a cumulative impact.
Projects include planting trees, building rain gardens, replacing pavement with green spaces, and converting lawns to wildlife habitat. GGC is a partnership between the Darby Creek Valley Association, Eastern Delaware County Stormwater Collaborative, Lower Merion Conservancy, and Pennsylvania Resources Council.
Our History
Since 2014, our partners have been united under the Delaware River Watershed Initiative, a program launched by the William Penn Foundation with the goal of achieving measurable water quality improvements in the greater Philadelphia area. Throughout the years, we have worked collectively on several projects funded by the National Fish and Wildlife Foundation, Pennsylvania DEP, and William Penn Foundation with the broad goals of educating about and installing green stormwater infrastructure within the heavily urbanized sections of Darby and Cobbs Creek Watersheds. These have included rain barrels, rain gardens, downspout planters, riparian buffers, bioswales, and more.
Through our partnership, we’ve helped to establish two community rain garden programs: Hav-A-Rain Garden in Haverford Township and Upper Darby Rain Gardens in Upper Darby. These programs each work with a team of trained volunteers that assess, design, and install rain gardens. In addition, we created the Stream Smart Stormwater House Calls program. Stream Smart offers audits focused on improving stormwater management on individual properties.
A need arose to establish a cohesive location to provide resources on the hows and whys of green stormwater infrastructure and establish a community of individuals equipped to make the small changes necessary to achieve a greener future. As the first phase of our larger vision, this website is an answer to those needs and more.
