The New London Day
Carrie Czerwinski
2/2/2025
Stonington — In less than two years, the Alliance for the Mystic River Watershed has gone from a group of concerned citizens to a nonprofit organization with $547,062 in grant awards.
The alliance, whose mission is to protect and support the health of the Mystic River watershed through education, advocacy and stakeholder participation and partnerships, has grown to more than 350 supporters and 50 municipal and tribal partners.
The alliance was formed in the wake of a failed bid to stop a house from being built in Old Mystic. Residents had said the project would cause irreversible damage to wetlands and the fragile creatures that live there while increasing flooding in the already flood-prone village.
For more than two years, residents and environmentalists, including alliance co-founder Maggie Favretti, fought to stop construction of a 2,800-square-foot home on Smith Street, saying the plan was a potential ecological disaster because Old Mystic contains the largest inland, freshwater marsh in southeastern Connecticut. They said it also filters groundwater that drains into the Mystic River and provides habitat for birds and wildlife.
Though the project was approved, it was the catalyst for the alliance, whose members already had concerns about how watersheds and their communities were being protected. It also was a recognition that community resilience in the face of rising sea levels, increasing flooding and degradation of the watershed required a coordinated effort.
The alliance now encompasses all the towns and tribal nations that make up the lands in the watershed, including Ledyard, Groton, North Stonington, Stonington and the Eastern and Mashantucket Pequot tribal nations as well as a youth council.
Alliance Director Brenda Geer, vice-chairwoman for the Eastern Pequot Tribal Nation, said last week that the two tribal nations got involved because their lands lie within the watershed boundaries, and they are directly impacted by its health.
She noted that the Eastern Pequots no longer take fish from the watershed due to degraded water quality and invasive species growth to the increasing loss of native fauna like heron due to a lack of food sources.
“We have been stewards of the lands forever — many hundreds of years, so we have a lot of techniques that we use, both traditional and spiritual, that the average non-tribal member who lives in these waterways will not know,” she said.
“As native people, we think seven generations ahead,” she said, noting that the alliance is also working with the Eastern Pequot Tribal Nation to ensure a project to build a longhouse on reservation land is using the most environmentally sustainable materials and leaving as small of an ecological footprint as possible.
Geer said the alliance’s ability to assist with the project is due to the strong relationships it continues to build.
She said she believes the relationships are a large part of why the alliance has seen such success so quickly, and noted that the varied relationships offer critical perspectives that might otherwise go unheard, such as those of indigenous members or youth.
Favretti said she believes the alliance has tapped into a yearning people have to work on something they are passionate about — the health of the Mystic River watershed and the wildlife that depends on it.
Wide-ranging initiatives
She explained that the organization has expanded its work to include topics from science to environmental justice, and has brought together groups that often work separately in an effort to promote environmental resilience, educate the community, provide resources and represent the people who live in the watershed.
The alliance has hosted informational gatherings from discussions of oyster culture, including the relationship between Pequot culture and oysters, to policy discussions and kayak outings. It is also working in schools and at the municipal and state levels.
Last spring the alliance began advocating to protect river herring, a species of great significance to the food web, and has been successful at expanding Clean Up Sound and Harbors and Environmental Protection Act Watershed testing zones.
To date, the alliance has held 12 conferences that brought together town planners, nonprofits and researchers in an effort to improve coordination and access to resources, as well as educational gatherings and design workshops, and participated in data collection and invasive species removal.
The alliance also received a grant to conduct a climate vulnerability assessment from Interstate 95 to Lantern Hill, received a gift of equipment to perform bacterial testing of water samples, and will be participating with the pathogen monitoring network as it builds a comprehensive watershed program.
Favretti noted that regional plans like the one the alliance is working on are rare but necessary because watershed protection and flooding do not stop at the borders of towns, and the few regional plans that do exist generally do not partner with youth or tribal nations.
“It’s not like any other watershed plan that you are likely to find in Connecticut,” Favretti said, adding that when community members are involved in the planning process they are more likely to have a sense of ownership in the plan and more likely to fund it.
She said the alliance youth council is helping develop the watershed plan, collecting data and disseminating it through a “living atlas” that is being created.
The atlas compiles not only data about water quality, land use, plants, animals and weather changes in the watershed into one location and provides the data in a variety of formats, but also contains stories and information about the cultural significance of water to Indigenous people. The community will be able to ask questions, which the youth council will answer or refer to experts.
More than protecting the watershed
Beyond protecting the watershed, the group is focused on environmental justice.
Its bylaws require co-governance by the two tribal nations and local youth and directors from each town. It also seeks to include historical and cultural perspectives in every aspect of its work.
The alliance has begun to identify ways it can take action to address inequity in issues such as census mapping, food access, water pollution and historical representation, as well as ensuring that ability, age or economics and other differences are not a barrier to participation in its work.
“Our goal is to include everyone who lives in the watershed because why wouldn’t we? We are all part of that interconnected watershed family,” she said.
In order to accomplish this, the alliance has enlisted the assistance of advisers with a variety of expertise.
Zbigniew Grabowski, associate director, said earlier this month a challenge for the group is finding consistent forms of revenue so it can maintain paid staff that is not dependent on grant funding.
Currently, the alliance has received more than 50% of the grants it has applied for, and Grabowski, one of two paid employees, is working on applications for far more.
Favretti said she believes the success of the alliance so far is in part due to a broad, nonpolitical concern for the health and safety of the watershed and those who live in it, and a desire to see both thrive in the future.
“I think the more polarized our political life gets in the country, the more eager people are to turn toward each other, and that turning toward each other gives people hope when they find out there’s hundreds of other people in their own communities who are also ready to share this purpose together,” she said.
