Communities across Colorado and New Mexico will have cleaner waterways as they work to become more sustainable, thanks to the hard work of this team of AmeriCorps VISTA members. VISTA members with the Western Hardrock Watershed Team based in Durango, CO each dedicate a year of service to their community and sponsoring organization to help expand services, raise funds, develop new collaborations, and create innovative and sustainable programs. These VISTA members engage community volunteers and citizens as partners in creating sustainable solutions to local problems around water quality.

Made possible by an innovative partnership among AmeriCorps VISTA, the Southwest Conservation Corps, the Office of Surface Mining (OSM), the Colorado Division of Reclamation, Mining and Safety, and local community/watershed groups, the Western Hardrock Watershed Team (WHWT) places year-long OSM/VISTA members with local groups to support citizen-centered community solutions. OSM/VISTA members are working in mostly rural communities impoverished by pre-regulatory mining, and help nonprofits secure funds, develop new collaborations, create innovative and sustainable partnerships and programs by building organizational capacity, and teach others to be good stewards of the environment. In the four years of the Team’s existence, OSM/VISTAs have shown great success in permanently improving the capacity of volunteer-led watershed groups and communities through supporting, training, organizing, motivating and empowering residents. Our program’s five core goals are structured to encourage citizen-centered community solutions, with support and collaboration from the WHWT:

1. Build local capacity supporting environmental stewardship 
2. Promote environmental stewardship activities in rural communities
3. Engage economic redevelopment around environmental stewardship
4. Enhance outreach and education around environmental stewardship
5. Promote professional development for OSM/VISTA members

In the last twelve months, our OSM/VISTA members have generated:
10,600 hours of service from community volunteers
$292,300 of in-kind resources for their nonprofit organizations
and $373,500 in grants for their nonprofit organizations.

OSM/VISTAs help implement successful environmental stewardship and community projects, and work with community leaders who will support these projects in the long run. Striving for sustainability after an OSM/VISTA’s term of service, WHWT promotes and encourages volunteerism and capacity building to bring real results to the communities we serve. OSM/VISTAs build capacity by recruiting and training community volunteers who are invested locally and able to continue addressing their own community’s recovery and revitalization.  Our work is about eliminating poverty beyond an OSM/VISTA’s term of service. The WHWT was founded and is coordinated by T Allan Comp, Ph.D., the OSM/VISTA Teams Coordinator of the OSM, at the request of the Colorado Division of Reclamation, Mining and Safety, to emulate the successes of the Appalachian Coal Country Team (ACCT) which has been operating the OSM/VISTA Program in rural Appalachia since 2002.

We are continually impressed by the hard work and dedication that has yielded such wonderful results from our OSM/VISTA members, and we proudly nominate the team for a Service Impact Award.