SEFS Associate Professor, Heidi Gough and Assistant Professor Sameer Shah have been selected for the second installment of the Research to Action Collaboratory (RAC) cohort. They will be joined by Amy Kuhl, Resiliency Program Manager of World Relief Western Washington and Lucas McClish, WRWW’s Community Garden Coordinator. The goal of the project is to strengthen Kent’s green stormwater infrastructure in the sixth most culturally diverse city in the U.S. The team will assist Paradise Gardens in being acknowledged as stormwater managers in an effort to earn the gardens stormwater credits through the city of Kent.

The cohort aims to model how other U.S. cities might implement sustainable, community-inspired stormwater management solutions and is part of a community garden project serving a refugee-immigrant population. With a long history of flooding, the city of Kent faces more challenges each year due to a growing population and increased, intense rain events. The project will take place at Paradise Gardens, a community food project that has been working on diverting millions of gallons of stormwater each year from flood-prone areas.

Read more about the community initiative at the Urban@UW site.