Getting Involved with Passyunk Square Civic Association

In my previous posts I’ve talked about green infrastructure in philly and the whole point behind the stormwater management we have in the city. (Which are accessible here: fist post and second post.) It was important I understood the process of our stormwater management system before I got any further into my project so that was the first thing I had down. Then I looked a little further into what our city has done to be a little different from others in its stormwater management process, and it turns out that the city is actually doing pretty well with it. I even got to check out what the fists water planters and rain gardens in the city looked like because they are super close to my house. I never really knew it until this project but the planters around Columbus Square are the first ones to be installed in the city. My park was like the test to see how they performed and what needed to change about the designs before the rest were put all around the city.

For my project’s agent of change I decided to volunteer with the Passyunk Square Civic Association and help out with the monitoring of some of the green infrastructure in my area. The whole process was about 3 weeks long with my first observation date being on the 3rd of May. Before that though I got in contact with Sarah Anton, the president of the Passyunk Square Civic Association. She was super nice and had enough time in her schedule to come meet me near the sites to show me how I would be monitoring them in the future. She emailed me a link to the form I would fill out everytime I went by which was around once a week or so. Then she went on to show me how to look out for the different systems. They all kind of had the same type of drainage and the main point was that you don’t want that clogged because then an rainwater that you got would just be trapped in the planter/ rain garden.

Monitoring the sites after a storm was where I really came in because that’s when things can get messed up with drainage and such but all I can do as a volunteer right now is submit that form in which I would point out anything that I feel should be addressed with the site. So I submitted a form for the Columbus planters talking about how they were in need of some tending with some graffiti on one but on some of the others I noticed that there was a whole lot of stuff covering the drain so I pointed those things out in the form. It’s up to the city if they feel the issues are big enough to address. So like I said my part was just to report it and that was all I could get myself  involved with.