Friends of Milwaukee's Rivers

PowerPoint Presentation Training

As part of its Municipal Stormwater Outreach Program, Friends of Milwaukee’s Rivers has created three PowerPoint presentations that train citizens to identify and prevent polluted stormwater runoff. The project envisions a team of informed Water Ambassadors willing to become familiar with the material, connect with potential audiences and make the presentations. Using volunteer presenters to supplement and extend in-house staff expertise increases the amount of people who can become informed and educate others about stormwater. 

The three presentations are:

• Environmentally-friendly lawn care and yard management

• Stormwater pollution and methods of reducing pollution sources in your own backyard through use of rain barrels, rain gardens, and other landscaping modifications

• Recognizing, detecting, and reporting potential illicit discharges and/or construction site violations

FMR staff will work with presenters to procure audiences. These could include garden clubs, faith groups, school groups, citizens gathered at a library, city employees and municipal leaders. Wisconsin’s stormwater legislation, NR 216, requires municipalities that operate Municipal Separate Storm Sewer Systems to fulfill educational and public participation requirements. Although FMR’s project area includes the 35 “urbanized” municipalities within the Milwaukee River Basin, we are focusing our efforts on four municipalities—Wauwatosa, Cedarburg, Milwaukee and Greenfield.  

Presenters will use a brief evaluation tool to assess the impact of each presentation, including the number of presentations given and the number of audience members served. Our goal is to train at least 10 volunteers to give a total of 40 presentations by the end of the year.    

All three presentations will be covered each night. We will reverse the order of our trainings so that someone who could only come late, or had to leave early, would still be trained on all three presentations by coming both nights. Of course, you can choose to come both nights- It's a lot of information to absorb in one sitting! Contact Jenni Reinke at  414-287-0207 x35 indicating your interest in becoming a PowerPoint presenter. The day of training for each presentation will be determined after we consider everybody’s interest and availability.