Professor, student start initiative to encourage rain gardens

James T. Spartz, a graduate student in the life sciences communication department, knows exactly where most of the excess rainwater from Madison’s Arbor Hills neighborhood flows: It ends up in three ponds in the UW–Madison Arboretum, where it deposits harmful amounts of sediment and organic nutrients.

“Stormwater runoff is a perpetual problem for [the Arboretum],” says Spartz. “It poses an ongoing threat to the unique ecology of [the area’s] waterways, and its flora and fauna.”

In an effort to help ameliorate this situation, Spartz and life sciences communication professor Bret Shaw are rolling out a community-based initiative this spring designed to encourage Arbor Hills residents to build rain gardens in their yards. If enough Arbor Hills residents are willing to install these landscape features — which collect and hold rainwater, allowing it to soak into the soil close to where it fell — the neighborhood could significantly reduce the volume of stormwater runoff reaching the Arboretum’s beleaguered ponds. Already, five homeowners have signed on.

“This summer, we’re hoping that a handful of rain gardens get installed, and then next summer a handful more, and then the following summer even more,” says Spartz. “In a few years, it could end up being a neighborhood with a lot of rain gardens in it.”

To ensure the initiative’s success, Spartz and Shaw spent the past few months putting together a coalition of stakeholders eager to see the project move forward, a group that has come to include members of the Arbor Hills Garden Club, the Arbor Hills Neighborhood Association, Friends of Lake Wingra, the Sierra Club and the Arboretum. From this group, they hope to see neighborhood leaders emerge to keep things running after they are no longer in the picture.

“We’d much rather have some empowered neighborhood activists in charge because we know our grant [to work on this project] ends this summer,” says Shaw. “And it’s not that we won’t stay involved, but that we’re trying to get infrastructure in place so that people will keep this initiative going when they don’t even remember who we are.”

Fortunately, these kinds of leaders are already starting to emerge. At a recent meeting about the initiative, representatives from the Arbor Hills Garden Club expressed their desire to be the go-to group for neighborhood residents looking for help and advice with rain garden installations. “The Garden Club wants to provide hyper-local resources for the neighborhood,” says Shaw, “so we’re working on making that happen.”

A dozen or so UW–Madison students can also claim to have played a role in this initiative, especially the very early stages of it. This community project was at the heart of Shaw’s Public Information Campaigns class last fall. During the course, students surveyed Arbor Hills residents about their familiarity with stormwater runoff issues and rain gardens, analyzed the responses, and then broke up into small groups to develop social marketing campaigns designed to promote rain garden installations in the neighborhood. Their findings were presented to Kevin McSweeney, the Arboretum’s director, and David Liebl, chairman of the Arboretum’s stormwater committee, as their final class project.

Knowing their ideas could be incorporated into a real campaign proved to be a great motivator. “Students knew from the beginning that [their efforts] would go somewhere, and they came up with some great ideas,” says Shaw. “Now James and I are trying to make [this initiative] happen, and not just for the duration of the grant cycle, but perpetually.”