Cass Street in Green Bay floods from the East River.
WCM is very proud to announce that the WCM Program Fund helped get an important video about climate change resiliency off the ground that will be distributed widely to municipalities, conservation groups, and the public.
The collaboration began when WCM Executive Director Mary Cardona met Dea Larsen Converse, Communications Director of the Wisconsin State Office of Climatology and the Wisconsin Initiative on Climate Change Impacts (WICCI) at a League of Wisconsin Municipalities annual conference. The two got to talking about the climate change resiliency project funded by the Wisconsin Coastal Management Program. A year or so later, when the state-wide assessment report was completed, Larsen Converse turned to Cardona to find a videographer through the WCM Program Fund to bring the report’s findings to life.
Cardona contacted Rachel Womack, an Independent Producer member of WCM and the owner of Today and Forever Videos, to find out if she would be interested in producing the program and she was! Womack completed the 19-minute piece with the collaboration of several organizations involved in the project including the Nature Conservancy, the University of Wisconsin Sea Grant Institute, NEWater, and the Natural Resources Foundation. Womack gained permission from local broadcasters covering flooding events to use their footage and Cardona asked Kris Berge, Coordinator, Wausau Area Access Media to provide the closed captioning for the piece. The University of Wisconsin Nelson Institute is hosting the YouTube video on its site and WCM is making a broadcast-quality version available to its 52 member media centers through the WCM File Share system.
The program highlights the work that the East River Collaborative in the Green Bay area has done to bring communities in the East River watershed together to discuss flooding issues and set priorities for action. While the video focuses on the East River watershed and how flooding has impacted the region, the nature-based solutions described can work elsewhere.
The increasing frequency and severity of weather events has made the need for resilience planning urgent for many communities in Northeast Wisconsin that are in the East River Watershed. In all, thirteen municipalities are located within the watershed and there is increasing suburban and urban development in this area as it nears the Bay of Green Bay. In recent years, flooding along the East River has damaged residents’ homes, businesses, public infrastructure and crops, and strained local emergency response resources.
The WCM Program Fund mission is to bring together non-profit organizations, videographers, media centers, and funders to create and distribute important programming to local and regional audiences. If you have an idea for a program, please get in touch through the WCM Executive Director at exec@wisconsincommunitymedia.com.
