Youth Water Leadership Program

The Youth Water Leadership Program (YWLP) inspires meaningful dialogue and active community engagement among youth and water resource professionals, climate science experts, and policy makers outside of the school setting.

The signature event, the Youth Water Summit is held locally within the local geographic watershed community (e.g. Roaring Fork Valley). This program is replicable and scalable as it can be created uniquely in individual watershed communities across the state and beyond.

The goals of the YWLP include:

  • increasing youth knowledge and critical thinking around water, climate change, and other local watershed issues and solutions;
  • cultivating culturally relevant youth connections to their watershed;
  • exposure to local environmental issues and careers in natural resources and STEM fields;
  • fostering dialogue among youth, teachers, community leaders, water policy decision makers, and resource professionals;
  • creating local, unique Youth Water Summits in many regions across the West with a collective larger Summit bringing participants from local Summits together to learn, engage in dialogue, and take action on watershed issues.

The YWLP emphasizes capacity building and civic life through its multiple opportunities for youth to engage in authentic direct experiences with watershed resources, water and climate change knowledge, and skill building to support independent thinking, deliberation, informed decision making, self-efficacy, resilience, and civic action. This holistic systems approach is critical for building participants’ capacity to create healthy, sustainable, resilient futures.

For more information contact Sarah Johnson at Wild Rose Education