Congratulations to Prairie Rivers Network Water Resources Scientist Stacy James on being recognized by the City of Champaign for her work helping city residents learn about and install rain gardens. She was presented her award in May at the City’s awards banquet.
Champaign’s Service Together Achieves Results program was created to recognize and acknowledge unsung heroes who are working to make the community a better place to live.
Stacy was recognized in the Neighborhood – Community Building category. This award recognizes excellence in community building within a neighborhood. Neighborhood-community building projects are activities that are initiated by any individual or group to improve the physical or social environment of a neighborhood.
In 2010, Stacy worked with residents of Champaign’s John Street and Washington Street neighborhoods to install several rain gardens. Both of these neighborhoods suffer from flooding problems. By working together to build rain gardens at sites selected by neighborhood residents, people learned firsthand how to create rain gardens in their own yards – these will benefit individual homeowners and the neighborhood overall.
Rain gardens are landscaping features that help capture rainwater and snowmelt, allowing it to soak into the ground rather than running off into storm sewers. This provides two big advantages to homeowners and local waterways:
1) Soil can absorb and break down water pollution such as lawn chemicals, pet waste, and motor oil and other chemicals that leak onto driveways from cars. The more water that percolates through soil before reaching groundwater and streams, the less water pollution there is.
2) Rainwater and snowmelt that run straight into storm drains go directly into local streams in a quick burst – this causes erosion and flooding problems downstream. Capturing and slowing down this water allows streams have more natural flows and less flooding and erosion
For information about how to create a rain garden, see Prairie Rivers Network’s rain garden brochure.