On June 22nd, half of the summer ALLARM team set off on a three-day Stream Team adventure to Lackawanna and Susquehanna Counties. We had many goals for this trip, including checking in with Lackawanna and Luzerne Stream Team volunteers (with time to collect quality control samples ); leading a Monthly Monitoring Workshop with volunteers from Susquehanna, Wyoming, and Bradford; and distributing more supplies as needed.
We began our journey on Thursday to meet up with the volunteers from Lackawanna and Luzerne Counties. As we ate dinner with the volunteers, we chatted about how monitoring has been going and gave space to share any questions, concerns, and highlights from monitoring. Meeting up in person also allowed us to provide them with equipment refills. Being able to interact with volunteers and have conversations with them was a real treat and something I look forward to doing more of in the future. Before we departed, the volunteers gave us recommendations of what we had to do in the area, leading to an additional road trip to Salt Springs State Park on Friday!
The next day we met with Jeremy Leaidicker, the Master Watershed Steward Coordinator – Endless Mountains, and taught him the ropes of monthly monitoring education in the first “Train the Trainer” experience we’ve hosted in a while. Since the training went so well, we knew Jeremy would be able to teach the volunteers returning for a refresher at the workshop the following day.
On the final day of the trip, we held a Stream Team Monthly Monitoring Workshop with Jeremy and his volunteers representing multiple counties in the area. This workshop served to introduce ALLARM and to both teach new volunteers how to use the monthly monitoring equipment, and refresh volunteers who had already been monitoring. I was nervous for this workshop as it would be my first time leading a group in a training, but reviewing my trainer tips list in the days prior to the event helped me feel prepared. One of my roles as we arrived to the training location was to make some turbid water so we could demonstrate how to use the turbidity tubes. I ended up making the water quite cloudy, but this allowed the monitors (many of which whom expressed having clear streams) the opportunity to really test out reading the equipment. The training portion of the workshop, occurring shortly after, ended up going very well, and I got the opportunity to train two volunteers from Wyoming County. They were fantastic as we worked through the manual together, and had very positive feedback for my first workshop experience!
Overall, I was happy with how the trip turned out and how I performed at the workshop. This trip made me feel much more confident in how to use the monitoring equipment as well as how to teach others how to use it. This trip really inspired a lot of growth in me, as teaching others has been outside of my comfort zone for some time. I also now feel much more comfortable creating connections with volunteers. I hope in the next year that I will be able to continue to expand these abilities and meet even more amazing monitors!
