Roundtable recap: Good funder rapport, detailed reports can be key to grant writing success

Eric Rosengrant is the president of the Moshannon Creek Watershed Association.

Riverkeeper note: The following recap of the March Riverkeeper Roundtable discussion is completed by Northern Tier Regional Director Emily Shosh.

Since 2019, the Moshannon Creek Watershed Association (MCWA) has been actively pursuing grants and partnerships to fund a variety of projects aiming to improve water quality of the Moshannon Creek Watershed.

Significantly affected by abandoned mine drainage, several grants over the years have funded treatment sites, water testing, education endeavors and an official restoration plan. 

“The first program we applied to was the Coldwater Heritage Partnership grant, and we used it for doing the initial study of Moshannon Creek from the top to bottom to understand what’s really happening now in that watershed. Parts of it had been studied before but this was a complete report,” said Eric Skrivseth, treasurer, past president, and founder of MCWA. 

“The idea of that whole project was to duplicate what was done on the West Branch when they did the ‘snapshot’ - they had teams up and down the river on the same day taking samples at all the streams and all the mouths so you had an idea what the worst contributors of loading were. Top to bottom,” said Eric Rosengrant, current MCWA president. “We had a lot of help from Rachel Kester, Tom Clark when he was with SRBC in planning this, and we had a lot of people buy into this initial conservation plan. PA Trout Unlimited, Conservation Districts, SRBC, PA DEP and immediately it lended our brand new organization a lot of legitimacy when we put out that report.” 

The conservation plan laid out several focus areas in the watershed, and grants have been utilized to chip away at those areas. The next major grant MCWA went after was the Appalachian Region Independent Power Producers Association (ARIPPA) AMD/AML grant.

“We got the ARIPPA grant with the idea of making some repairs to old treatment sites, making some analyses of the systems we inherited, and we got some good conclusions from it,” Rosengrant said.

Another program offered by the Western Pennsylvania Coalition for Abandoned Mine Reclamation (WPCAMR) is a reimbursement program which helped MCWA restore some funds to its account after making treatment repairs and redesigns. The Eastern Pennsylvania Coalition for Abandoned Mine Drainage is also very active in this work.

“We recently partnered with the Native Fish Coalition and the Clearfield County Conservation District to go after the Rough Run discharges,” Skrivseth said. One of these discharges named MCFORE is a main contributor of iron in the area. “We got a grant through the Eastern Brook Trout Joint Venture to design a treatment system for that. The project is underway - we’re in the middle of it,” Skrivseth said. The grant requires a 1:1 match, which warranted some creativity on MCWA’s part to secure. 

“We were able to add a study on the headwaters for over three miles to really look at it in detail, which we did ourselves. Native Fish Coalition agreed to help with lab costs,” Skrivseth said.

Between the two organizations, match was secured and more about the discharge was discovered including one discharge that put out 120 gallons per minute.

“The more partners you have the more credibility you have, because more people know about you and who you are. There’s a whole network of people working in Abandoned Mine Drainage in Pennsylvania, and a lot of them are good about communicating grant opportunities to each other. Build a network of people that are working on the same problem and then pay attention to what they tell you because that’s where a whole lot of our tip-off’s came from,” Skrivseth added.

“We’re fortunate right now too to have the Bipartisan Infrastructure Law that is still on the books that grants a lot of money for mine drainage work. As long as that remains, there are a lot of organizations looking to use the money,” Rodengrant said.

On the topic of building rapport with funders, Skrivseth mentioned to “make sure you do everything you’re supposed to do and do it well. You track the money, you make the match, you do the project you’re supposed to do and produce a good report. Produce something that’s quality and if you have a website, put your reports on your website. Make it easy to see that you’re for real.”

For more information on Moshannon Creek Watershed Association, visit their website or Facebook page.

Check out the full video recording of this session here: