For a hundred years, Friends of the Wissahickon have been hard at work safeguarding the creek first from pollution, and now from climate change, writes Allison Beck for Billy Penn at WHYY.
Volunteers are often busy collecting rusted car parts and filling bags with garbage gathered from the brush along the creek. Sometimes they run into something rather unusual, like a turntable buried in the ground.
“It just doesn’t surprise me anymore,” said Shawn Green, Director of Field Stewardship for the Friends of the Wissahickon. “But some trash, I wonder, what is the story that is attached to this, how did this particular item get out to the woods?”
This year marks a full century since Friends of the Wissahickon was first founded.
“We’ve come a long way in a hundred years,” said Green. “We started off as just a small volunteer-based community organization, and now we have a paid staff, tons and tons of volunteer opportunities, and I see us continuing down that path.”
And the group keeps growing.
FOW’s has a long history of overcoming environmental challenges, and that legacy continues today as it looks to address climate change.
Read more about Friends of the Wissahickon in Billy Penn at WHYY.
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