Clean water and healthy watersheds come from collaboration. Willamette Partnership is seeking an inspired and highly competent project manager ready to deliver policy solutions that cross boundaries to support bigger, stronger, and faster environmental outcomes.
This position is expected to contribute to new and ongoing projects that may include:
- Lead the development of water quality trading policy tools and templates in cooperation with state agencies;
- Conduct outreach to inspire uptake of national best practices for water quality trading;
- Facilitate national conversations on innovative approaches to achieving clean water goals, including trading, green infrastructure, and advances in watershed management; and
- Strategic integration between the Partnership’s work in habitat incentives, floodplain management, and connecting human health and the outdoors.
This position is also expected to participate in setting the direction, strategies, and goals of the Clean Water program.
The ideal candidate is a critical, analytical, and creative thinker; an optimist; and an excellent communicator. An understanding of watershed science, experience with the Clean Water Act (particularly TMDL and NPDES program), and facilitation of broad stakeholder groups are highly recommended.
Background of organization: In 1996, Willamette Basin Task Force formed to develop coordinated and effective protection and restoration of the Willamette River Basin.
The Willamette Restoration Initiative emerged from the Task Force as an ongoing, basin-wide organization. Its task was to create the 2001 Willamette Restoration Strategy, an integrated approach to addressing water quality, flooding, fish, and wildlife habitat issues and the overall watershed health of the Willamette Basin.
From the Willamette Restoration Initiative, Willamette Partnership was founded as a non-profit coalition of conservation, city, business, farm, and scientific leaders in 2004. The coalition’s purpose was to develop innovative, market-based tools to deliver broad conservation benefits at lower costs and with reduced conflict. Early work on developing these tools was supported by a Targeted Watershed Grant from the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency to build a water quality trading program.
In 2007, a Conservation Innovation Grant from the USDA Natural Resources Conservation Service allowed the Partnership to build a more integrated market-based approach that crossed traditional resource “silos.” The Counting on the Environment process developed tools for land managers and regulators to evaluate the outcomes of restoration work and participate in emerging markets for water quality improvements, wetland restoration, and upland habitat conservation.
[Photo credit: Willamette Partnership]